AI teams · Routing

The best model for the call. Not the one wired in last quarter.

Apinizer's AI Gateway routes every prompt by cost, latency, capability, and policy. Frontier model when needed; regional when sufficient; open-weight when sovereign — all under one identity, one audit, one runtime.

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Multi-LLM routing — For AI teams use case overview from Apinizer. — For AI teams · Multi-LLM routing

The problem

One hard-wired model is one outage and one cost spike away from regret.

Services pick a model in a sprint and inherit its bill, its rate limit, its sovereignty profile, and its outages forever. When the provider has an incident, the app does too. When a cheaper model would serve, the team pays the frontier price anyway. Apinizer turns the model into a policy decision — per call, not per service.

Capabilities

What Apinizer does here

Rule-based conditional routing

Route on the attributes of the call — consumer, project, headers, requested model class. Summarization to a small model, code generation to a code-specialist, vision to a multi-modal — without changing the application.

Least-cost and least-latency routing

Two routing algorithms decide for you: least-cost picks off the model catalog's unit pricing, least-latency picks off live health-probe latency. Frontier providers only when the rules say so, and a per-leg cost ceiling on every fall-back.

Failover and load balancing

Provider hiccup? Traffic rolls to the next provider in the pool with the same capability profile. Application doesn't know there was an incident.

Sovereignty rules

Personal data routes only to providers in approved jurisdictions. The policy is data, not code; the rule applies to every call automatically.

Cross-family failover without client changes

A fall-back leg on another vendor family gets the request rebuilt in that vendor's native format — OpenAI in, Anthropic or Gemini or Bedrock out. Retries stay idempotent, so a failed leg is never billed twice.

Open-weight + frontier in one pool

Local llama / mistral / qwen deployments live in the routing pool alongside hosted providers. The application doesn't choose; the policy does.

Use cases

In production, this looks like…

Banking
Istanbul bank routes Turkish-language calls to a local model first
90% of customer-service summaries handled by a TR-tuned model hosted in-country. Frontier providers used only for adversarial or English-mixed cases.
90% local, 10% frontier
Manufacturing
Munich OEM routes engineering Q&A to a code-specialist model
Code generation and review go to a code-specialized model; design-doc summarization to a general model. Tail latency drops; quality goes up.
Insurance
Paris insurer keeps PII calls inside EU-hosted providers
Routing rule reads the request headers and payload. Anything that looks like PII routes only to providers in approved jurisdictions; everything else has the full pool.
Retail
Madrid retailer fails over a provider outage in seconds
Frontier provider returns 5xx for 14 minutes. The gateway rolls to the secondary; application keeps serving without an incident page.
0 user-facing impact
Media
Milan publisher trials a cheaper model in a load-balanced pool
The new model joins the primary pool alongside the incumbent. Per-model cost, latency, and error telemetry in the Analytics Engine settle the question in a week; cutover is one policy change, and rollback is just as easy.
Healthcare
Prague hospital routes clinical Q&A only to certified models
Compliance-approved model list maintained centrally. Routing never picks an uncertified model; auditors stop asking 'which model answered'.
Government
Riyadh ministry routes Arabic content to a national model first
Sovereign Arabic LLM gets first call; frontier providers as fallback. Cost falls; sovereignty story tightens.
Energy
Baku utility runs operations agents on open-weight models
Local 70B model runs SCADA agent prompts. Hosted providers reserved for non-operational use. The agent never leaves the operator network.