Last month my Claude API bill was $847. This month it's $73. Same output quality. Here's the system I built.

The Problem

I run multiple AI-powered services — content generation, email classification, SEO optimization, data extraction. Every call was going to Claude Sonnet because "it works." But most of those calls didn't need Sonnet-level intelligence.

Classifying an email as spam? That's a Haiku job. Generating embeddings? Ollama handles that for free. Writing a full article? OK, that's Sonnet. But only 15% of my calls actually needed the expensive model.

The Architecture: Empire Router

I built a routing layer that sits between my application code and the LLM providers. Every request gets classified by complexity, then routed to the cheapest model that can handle it.

from empire_router import router

# Auto-routed based on task complexity response = router . complete ( prompt = " Classify this email: ... " , task = " classify " # Routes to Haiku ($0.80/M tokens) )

response = router .…