AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to IQ Routing
Route every LLM call to the cheapest model that holds quality. Chatbots, RAG, agent loops, and finance. Cut spend 40 to 80 percent, measured on our own traffic, live in thirty seconds.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 4 we have checked on their own sites, 3 of them free or with a free tier.
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FastRouter.aifree tier, from $199/mo▲364Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality
22d ago · fastrouter.ai · its alternatives →
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We built a model router that plugs into coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and intelligently sends requests to the best model to serve them. Here's a quick demo of running it locally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM. At Weave, we write most of our code with AI, and it's been getting more expensive. This came to a head when Opus 4.7 was released and, thanks to its tokenizer changes, our costs shot up. We knew we didn't need Opus for everything but we didn't want to lose out on the intelligence for the cases where you really need it. So we decided…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Many teams connecting LLMs to external tools eventually encounter the same architectural issue: as more tools and agents are added, the integration pattern becomes an N×M mesh of direct connections. Each agent implements its own auth, retries, rate limiting, and logging; each tool needs credentials distributed to multiple places and observability becomes fragmented. We built LLM gateway with this goal to provide a single place to manage authentication, authorization, routing, and observability for MCP servers, with a path toward a more general agent-gateway architecture in the future. The…
Dec 2025 · truefoundry.com · its alternatives →
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The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol. Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day. A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship…
Mar 2026 · georgelarson.me · its alternatives →
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LLM Gatewayfree tier▲296I built an OpenAI-compatible LLM gateway that routes requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, llama-server, SGLang... anything that speaks /v1/chat/completions. Single Go binary, one YAML config file, no infrastructure. It does the things you'd expect from this kind of gateway... semantic routing via a three-layer cascade (keyword heuristics, embedding similarity, LLM classifier) that picks the best model when clients omit the model field, weighted round-robin load balancing across local inference servers with health checks and failover. The part I think is most…
2025 · llmgateway.io · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, we've just finished building a dynamic router for LLMs, which takes each prompt and sends it to the most appropriate model and provider. We'd love to know what you think! Here is a quick(ish) screen-recroding explaining how it works: https://youtu.be/ZpY6SIkBosE Best results when training a custom router on your own prompt data: https://youtu.be/9JYqNbIEac0 The router balances user preferences for quality, speed and cost. The end result is higher quality and faster LLM responses at lower cost. The quality for each candidate LLM is predicted ahead of time…
2024 · unify.ai · its alternatives →
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Weave Router 2.0free tier, from $50/mo▲341Subscription Aware Coding Agent Router (GPT-6 Intelligence)
Sep 2026 · weaveos.com · its alternatives →
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Context Gateway▲220We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Respan Gateway▲352One AI gateway with built-in observability and evals
Jun 2026 · respan.ai · its alternatives →
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ModelPilot▲94Optimize Performance, Cost, Speed & Carbon for each prompt
Nov 2025 · modelpilot.co · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, We've been building a multi-model API for LLMs called OpenRouter since we launched the Window AI extension in April this year [0]. The events of the last week make it clear the LLM landscape is unpredictable, so LLM aggregators are picking up interest. Unlike others, we're making a router on top of a public, explorable dataset. We recently built a way to rank and visualize this data, including the token counts we see going to and from different models, both open-sourced (like Llama, Mistral, finetunes, and variants) and closed-sourced (OpenAI, Anthropic). The API supports - 50+…
Apr 2026 · openrouter.ai · its alternatives →
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IndexedAI▲89Your site scores X/100 for AI agents with next steps
May 2026 · indexedai.tech · its alternatives →
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Web Speed▲118Hey everyone, I've been working on a tool called Web Speed. It takes web pages full of HTML and parses them into an easily readable sitemap for an AI agent. By ensuring the AI doesn't have to analyze the full HTML from the page or screenshots of the page, it makes the agent a lot cheaper and faster. It's MCP-native, so any AI that supports MCP can run it and take control of your browser for you. There are both “normal” and post-auth versions live on GitHub. What I think is the coolest thing about the project is the global cache of sitemaps. When a user visits a site, it takes the sitemap and…
May 2026 · getwebspeed.io · its alternatives →
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RouKey▲98Route each task to the smartest AI for the job
2025 · expireddomains.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, We’re building https://www.switchpoint.dev – a drop-in replacement for OpenAI’s API that reduces LLM cost by smartly routing across models (e.g., Claude, Gemini, GPT-4) depending on subject and difficulty of the task. Why we built this: LLM costs are spiraling—especially for products doing retrieval, agentic reasoning, or even just high-volume chat. We were frustrated with paying GPT-4 rates when most queries didn’t need it. So we built a router that: - Starts with cheaper/free models (like Llama 8B, 4o-mini, 2.0 flash) - Streams responses and upgrades on failure - Acts…
2025 · switchpoint.dev · its alternatives →
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Smart Router — AI API Gateway from $18.97/mo▲1Save 50-80% on AI API costs — automatically.
Aug 2026 · 2229577636392.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN — we're the team behind Arch (https://github.com/katanemo/archgw), an open-source proxy for LLMs written in Rust. Today we're releasing Arch-Router (https://huggingface.co/katanemo/Arch-Router-1.5B), a 1.5B router model for preference-based routing, now integrated into the proxy. As teams integrate multiple LLMs - each with different strengths, styles, or cost/latency profiles — routing the right prompt to the right model becomes a critical part of the application design. But it's still an open problem. Most routing systems fall into two…
2025 · its alternatives →
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Agent-aware LLM cost tracking for small teams.
Jun 2026 · agentgate-theta.vercel.app · its alternatives →
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Self-hosted LLM router. Cost effective, deterministic, and fast. Secure and private by default. - Northwood-Systems/millwright
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →