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A conversational chatbot handles a wide range of user messages - greetings, simple FAQs, moderate questions, and occasional complex multi-turn conversations. Most messages are short and simple. Sending all of them to a frontier model wastes 70–80% of your LLM budget. Savings on this workload: typically 60–75% vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 baseline.

Step 1 - Create the profile

  1. Go to Playground → Configure
  2. Name it Chatbot Production
  3. Set tier floor: SIMPLE, ceiling: STANDARD
  4. Set cost cap: $0.005
  5. Leave Vision and Tool calling unchecked
  6. Click Save & get API key

Step 2 - Use the profile key in your app

Replace your existing OpenAI key with the profile key from step 1.

Node.js

Python


Step 3 - Check routing decisions

After running a few messages, open Dashboard → Overview to see:
  • Which tier each message routed to
  • Cost per request
  • Savings vs baseline
Simple greetings should route to SIMPLE. Refund questions and policy lookups should route to LIGHT or STANDARD. If you’re seeing COMPLEX-tier routing on simple messages, raise the issue in Troubleshooting or test the specific prompt in the Playground.

Streaming

For a better user experience, enable streaming to show responses word-by-word. Routor supports streaming identically to the OpenAI API.

Cost estimate

On a chatbot handling 10,000 messages/day with a typical mix of short and medium messages: At scale this compounds significantly. A chatbot serving 1M messages/month can save $2,000–3,000/month.