Stop Optimizing for the Cheapest Token. Optimize Quality-per-Dollar.
1Key Takeaways
- Originally published on the TierUp blog .
- The 2026 evidence on LLM routing: why both "always the flagship" and "always the cheapest" leave money on the table.
- For the first couple of years of the LLM API era, teams picked a model the way they picked a database: once, emotionally, and then defended the choice in perpetuity.
- Some hardcoded the frontier model because "quality matters." Others hardcoded the cheapest model because "it's mostly good enough." Both camps are leaving money — or….
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3Why it matters
Coding AI shifts how fast software ships and how much human review each change needs. DEV — ML reports that originally published on the TierUp blog .
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