IQ Routing

IQ Routing's per-step model selection can cut LLM costs by 40-80%, turning a fixed retainer into a higher-margin engagement. For agencies running multi-step agent loops, the savings compound per step, directly boosting client lifetime value without renegotiating fees.

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.

Concentration Risk Ledger is a framework for tracking how much of an agency's delivery capacity depends on any single model provider, region, or price tier. The unit of analysis is not the vendor relationship but the retainer: for each client engagement, list which workflows break if one provider raises prices, degrades quality, or restricts access. Forrester warned in October 2026 that AI supply chains hide single points of failure in plain sight, and the same week Anthropic cut Claude Haiku 5.5 to $0.10 per million input tokens while OpenAI shipped GPT-6 to 1.2 billion weekly users, both reminders that pricing and capability floors move fast. An agency running every client summarization job through one API has an unpriced liability. The ledger converts that into a number: percentage of monthly delivery hours exposed, and the cost of a routing layer that reduces it.

Provider Concentration Ratio is the share of an agency's live client delivery that depends on a single model vendor, measured in billable projects rather than API keys. A retainer running three client builds on one provider's API looks diversified on an invoice and is not: a pricing change, a deprecation, or a guardrail shift hits all three at once. The ratio matters because infrastructure cost is a pass-through that agencies rarely reprice mid-contract, so a vendor move lands directly on margin. The practical test is to count distinct providers behind each deliverable and flag any client where one vendor carries more than half the inference load. Routing layers such as OpenRouter, Portkey, and Helicone exist to make that count adjustable without rewriting application code. The same discipline applies to compute: industry executives expect only 7 to 10 of hundreds of AI cloud providers to survive consolidation, so GPU capacity booked with a single neocloud carries the same concentration risk as a single-model stack.

Adopt IQ Routing only if your agency's LLM API spend exceeds $1,000 per month and you can invest time in configuring quality thresholds per step.

Treat provider portability as a delivery requirement: put a gateway or routing layer in front of every model call, and price the migration path into the retainer before the first token is billed.

If your agency runs multi-step agent loops or high-volume chatbot workloads on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, and you can manage separate API keys for each provider, then IQ Routing's Free tier with 240 requests/min is a low-risk pilot. Upgrade to the $70/month Team plan only when you need per-team budgets, audit logs, and custom band maps to enforce cost controls across client projects.

A 5-7 day sprint to deploy IQ Routing as a drop-in LLM gateway for a client, cutting their API spend by 40-80% through automatic model routing and semantic caching.