IQ Routing Cost Band Strategy

IQ Routing's core value for agencies is its per-step routing capability, which assigns each API call to the cheapest model that can handle it without sacrificing quality. This framework, the Cost Band Strategy, involves mapping your client's workflows into distinct quality tiers: 'cheap' for simple tasks like classification or extraction, 'auto' for balanced performance, and 'frontier' for complex reasoning or creative generation. By configuring custom band maps in IQ Routing, you can enforce these tiers per step, ensuring that a summarization call uses a cheaper model while a code generation step uses a frontier one. For an agency running a multi-step agent loop for a client, this compounds savings across thousands of calls, potentially cutting LLM costs by 40-80%. The Team plan at $70/month includes custom band maps, making it a low-cost investment that can be passed on as a managed service retainer, improving your margin on AI projects.

By InnovaAI Research·Published 28 Aug 2026·Updated 11 Sep 2026