Executive Summary

Developers building LLM-backed features face rapidly rising and unpredictable API costs and a lack of tooling that automatically reduces spend without degrading response quality; engineering and finance teams at an estimated 2M developer teams report manual routing or one-size-fits-all model choices that don't scale. This creates operational pain where small percentage improvements in per-request cost compound into large monthly savings, but teams lack safe, automated ways to exploit new low-cost models. Build a developer-first SDK/proxy that routes each API request to the cheapest model that meets a configurable quality threshold using real-time evaluation, conservative fallbacks, and continuous calibration, with native support for hosted and open models, per-request telemetry, and billing reconciliation. The product should be drop-in compatible with common stacks so teams can measure savings quickly and roll back if quality diverges. The market is attractive now: a $5.0B addressable market (2M teams × $2.5K ACV) with buyers increasingly viewing AI API spend as an ops line item and a high appetite for measurable cost-optimization (market score 90/100, revenue potential 86/100). The growing supply of low-cost models multiplies arbitrage opportunities that routing software can exploit. You can stand out by prioritizing developer ergonomics, conservative quality-preserving routing backed by automated verification and SLAs, and transparent cost-savings reporting, but be upfront that latency, evaluation drift, vendor risk, and integration complexity are real challenges that require ongoing investment; competition is medium, so execution and trust will determine success.

Market Opportunity

Automatically route API requests to cheaper LLMs while preserving quality targets a $5.0B = 2M developer teams × $2.5K ACV (teams building or operating LLM-backed features paying for optimization tooling) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 40% YoY — estimated growth in AI API and developer tooling adoption based on industry reports and developer platform growth (2023-2025).

Key trends driving demand: Many new low-cost open and hosted models are available — this creates arbitrage opportunities that routing software can exploit.; Companies are treating AI API spend as an operational cost center — this increases willingness to buy tools that deliver measurable savings.; Developer-first SDKs and proxies are the preferred integration pattern — making a drop-in cost-optimization SDK more likely to be adopted quickly.; Observability and MLops expectations are rising — teams want cost and quality metrics together, which enables an upsell path from observability to automated routing..

Key competitors include OpenRouter, LangSmith, OpenAI Enterprise cost controls.

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Automatically route API requests to cheaper LLMs while preserving quality

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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