Cutting Claude API Costs in Half with a 3-Tier Routing System (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus)

Short summary

Routing Claude API tasks to the right model (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus) based on context length instead of task complexity reduces costs 47% from $180-200 to $95-110/month. Context length matters more than complexity—Haiku handles complex work under 2K tokens well but fails on simple tasks over 5K tokens. Despite 8% retry costs, the routing system pays for itself many times over.

• •Implement 3-tier routing based on context length rather than task complexity for Claude API cost optimization
• •Real production result: 47% cost reduction ($180-200 to $95-110/month) from routing simple tasks to Haiku instead of Sonnet
• •Counter-intuitive finding: context length is the primary routing decision point; 8% retry rate is acceptable given savings

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