Last month my Claude API bill was $847. This month it's $73. Same output quality. Here's the system I built. The Problem I run multiple AI-powered services — content generation, email classification, SEO optimization, data extraction. Every call was going to Claude Sonnet because "it works." But most of those calls didn't need Sonnet-level intelligence. Classifying an email as spam? That's a Haiku job. Generating embeddings? Ollama handles that for free. Writing a full article? OK, that's Sonnet. But only 15% of my calls actually needed the expensive model. The Architecture: Empire Router I built a routing layer that sits between my application code and the LLM providers. Every request gets classified by complexity, then routed to the cheapest model that can handle it. from empire_router import router # Auto-routed based on task complexity response = router . complete ( prompt = " Classify this email: ... " , task = " classify " # Routes to Haiku ($0.80/M tokens) ) response = router .…