This week we measured a model at 1/270th the price of the best — at 99% of its quality.
Measured model routing

Cut your AI bill in half.

The right model(s) for every request.

  • AI bills fall 49% when Potion routes each request to the cheapest model measured good enough.
  • Cost, quality, or speed: you set the rule, Potion picks from the measured Pareto frontier.
  • Your routing stays current automatically: new models are measured on release, and our research finds model combinations nobody else has.
  • One line of code. Every answer carries a receipt: what ran, and why.
receipt
kind of work
classification
routed to
or-deepseek-v4-flash-0731
price · quality
$0.0201/1k · q 0.99 94%
why
cheapest point within a point of the perfect scorers
routing 6 measured requests…
requestrouted toprice/1kquality

six real decisions from the measured frontier — not a simulation · click a row for its receipt

The obvious question

Isn't this what OpenRouter does?

No. A gateway answers how do I call any model? Potion answers which model does this request deserve? Those are different layers, and the second one is where the money is.

You get
gateway · Every model, one API
The right model for each request
Who chooses
gateway · You do, once per app
The measurements do, per request
Based on
gateway · Leaderboards, habit, vibes
Held-out tests of your kind of work
Quality
gateway · Whatever you picked
A floor your traffic never falls below
After the answer
gateway · Tokens and a price
A receipt: what served it, and why
A new model ships
gateway · You re-evaluate by hand
Measured first, adopted only if it earns it

Access stopped being scarce the day gateways shipped. Judgment — measured per kind of work, stated with its error bars, enforced as a floor — is the scarce layer. That layer is Potion, and it works the same over any gateway or provider underneath.

Measured, not claimed

The same work.
A 270× price range.

Five models writing code to specification — scored by running their code, not by opinion. The quality difference across this table is two points in a hundred. The price difference is two hundred and seventy fold.

This is why routing pays: most requests deserve the bottom row, a few genuinely need the top one, and only a measurement can tell them apart.

measured 2026-08-20 · retrieval-hostile suite · scored by execution · error bars on the full table in the docs

or-grok-4.6xAIquality 1.000 · $6.2568/1k
or-gemini-flashGooglequality 0.996 · $0.5506/1k
or-gpt-miniOpenAIquality 0.990 · $0.2509/1k
or-deepseekDeepSeekquality 0.980 · $0.1904/1k
or-████████████name withheldquality 0.979 · $0.0231/1k

↑ the routed pick — 99% of the top row's quality at 1/270th the price. The name? That's the product.

bars show cost per 1,000 requests · teal = what a 0.95 quality floor actually buys

Sometimes the answer is not one model

A mixture can beat anything you could have picked.

A cheap model answers and reports how sure it is. Only when that confidence falls below a measured threshold does the request go on to a stronger one. Most traffic never reaches the expensive model at all — so the combination can land at the top of the measured quality range while costing a fraction of sending everything to the strong model.

There is nothing for you to assemble. You set the same rule you would set anyway — stay above this quality, stay under this cost — and if a combination is the best way to honour it, that is what serves your request. The receipt names whatever answered.

There are far more useful combinations than there are models, and almost none of them have been measured by anyone. That is the dimension this company is named for.

a cascade · measured as one strategy
requesta cheap modelanswers first?sure enough?yesdonenoa stronger modelonly when neededdone
How you know we are not making this up

The actual map. Drive it yourself.

Measured options for one kind of work, error bars included. Pick a rule, drag the slider, and you are running the same selection the router runs in production — including its refusal to answer when nothing measured qualifies.

the measured map · one kind of work · selection runs as you drag
0.40.60.81.0$0.01$0.1$1cost per 1,000 requests (log)measured qualityfloor 0.60or-████████████ — q 0.50 ±0.14 · $0.0093/1k · p95 7,160 msor-████████████or-deepseek-v4-flash-0731 — q 0.98 ±0.04 · $0.0304/1k · p95 9,702 msor-deepseek-v4-flash-0731or-nemotron-3.5-lightning — q 0.76 ±0.12 · $0.0845/1k · p95 2,739 msor-nemotron-3.5-lightningor-gpt-full — q 0.56 ±0.14 · $0.1482/1k · p95 1,126 msor-gpt-fullor-gemini-flash — q 0.66 ±0.13 · $0.1656/1k · p95 2,293 msor-gemini-flashor-inkling-small — q 0.92 ±0.08 · $0.1906/1k · p95 4,009 msor-inkling-smallor-gemini-3.7-flash — q 1.00 ±0.00 · $0.2929/1k · p95 3,242 msor-gemini-3.7-flashor-inkling — q 0.94 ±0.07 · $0.5657/1k · p95 2,449 msor-inklingor-kimi-k3 — q 0.96 ±0.05 · $1.65/1k · p95 2,422 msor-kimi-k3

or-deepseek-v4-flash-0731 — quality 0.98 ±0.04, $0.0304 per 1k requests, p95 9,702 ms.

x-frontier-trace: cluster=multi-step-reasoning;strategy=1fd419ee;frontier=v3;policy=min_cost;fallback=0;provenance=live

Real measured points, quoted from the committed frontier — hover any dot for its name and numbers. The cheapest row costs under a cent per 1k and measures 0.50, a coin flip, which is exactly why the router will not send reasoning work there: cheap only wins where the measurement clears your floor. Try latency_bound at 2,500 ms — the answer changes.

The business

We get paid out of what we save you.

Usage-based today. The direction of travel is to charge against measured savings — the only pricing that stays honest when the whole point of the product is spending less, and the only one that makes the bill fall when we do our job badly.

Customers bring no accounts and no keys. Potion buys from every provider at once, which is also what lets it reach the whole market rather than the one account a customer happened to open.

what a customer gets on day one
One line of code

Point your client at Potion. Nothing else about your app changes.

Routing on every measured kind of work

Each request goes where the evidence says it should, not where habit does.

A quality floor

A line their traffic is never allowed to fall below, enforced per request.

A receipt on every answer

What was chosen, why, and which measurements it relied on.

A spending cap

The request is refused before the money is spent, never after.

A bill that argues for itself

Spend is attributable to decisions you can audit, line by line.

Change one line. Keep the receipts.

Point a client at Potion and watch the routing decisions arrive with the answers.