Model Routing for Claude Code: Cutting Agent Costs by 70% Without Losing Quality

Short summary

After tracking three months of Claude Code spending, the author found 60-70% of agent turns don't need a frontier model — file reads, grep, and simple edits produce identical results on Haiku at 1/60th the cost. Routing tools like Ramp Router, Entelligence, and Frugal let you delegate subtasks to cheaper tiers, cutting spend from ~$10,200 to ~$3,100/month. The key insight: use verified escalation where a tier only steps up when a concrete check (test suite, compiler, schema validation) fails, rather than letting cheap models self-assess.

• •60-70% of Claude Code agent turns produce identical results on Haiku vs Opus at 1/60th cost
• •Model routing tools (Ramp Router, Entelligence, Frugal) are becoming a category
• •Verified escalation — stepping up only when concrete checks fail — outperforms self-assessment by cheap models

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