{"slug": "the-cheapest-routing-decision-is-the-one-that-costs-no-tokens", "title": "The cheapest routing decision is the one that costs no tokens", "summary": "Cloudflare cut its AI code reviewer's cost per review from $2.43 to $0.77 and median review time from 4m 09s to 1m 32s, a 68% reduction in inference bill, by using shared prompt-cache prefixes, fewer LLM calls per session, and repeated model/effort A/B tests, the company detailed in a blog post. The post frames those gains as limited to optimization inside a single committed provider, model and effort level, leaving the earlier routing decision unaddressed. terraphim-llm-proxy is positioned as filling that routing layer at zero token cost.", "body_md": "Cloudflare published an excellent post this week: [Cutting our inference bill by 68% by being obsessive about optimization](https://blog.cloudflare.com/obsessive-inference-optimization/). Their AI code reviewer went from $2.43 to $0.77 per review, and the median review time fell from 4m 09s to 1m 32s. It is a masterclass in squeezing the token economics of a single provider: shared prompt-cache prefixes, fewer LLM calls per session, and relentless model/effort A/B tests.\n\nIt is also a study in what optimisation inside the call cannot reach. Every one of their levers operates after the request has already been committed to a provider, a model, and an effort level. The layer before that commitment — *which lane does this request deserve?* — was answered in their architecture by experiment, not by a decision mechanism. That layer is what terraphim-llm-proxy exists for, and the interesting part is that its answer costs zero tokens.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-cheapest-routing-decision-is-the-one-that-costs-no-tokens", "canonical_source": "https://terraphim.ai/posts/zero-token-routing-vs-cloudflare/", "published_at": "2026-10-23 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-23 09:44:06.702351+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "large-language-models", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Cloudflare", "terraphim-llm-proxy"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-cheapest-routing-decision-is-the-one-that-costs-no-tokens", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-cheapest-routing-decision-is-the-one-that-costs-no-tokens.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-cheapest-routing-decision-is-the-one-that-costs-no-tokens.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-cheapest-routing-decision-is-the-one-that-costs-no-tokens.jsonld"}}