I built a router to cut my agent bill. Then found out it only knows how to spend up.

I built a router to cut my agent bill. Then I actually looked at which way it routes. 8,458 requests escalated up. Zero went down. Some context on the scale first. Across 59,299 requests the list-price total came to about $5,085. Those ran on flat-rate Max subs though. Real cash out of pocket was a few hundred bucks, not $5k. I want that clear up front, nobody paid five grand here. Median request was 4 cents. No runaway and no single monster call. Just tens of thousands of cheap ones stacked up. The escalations came to around $1,505 of that list total, so the bill could have been maybe 30% lower. Not because the router is bad. Because it only ever routes up. The thing that actually saved money was caching, not the router. Uncached the list price would have been $16,980. Cached it was $5,085. About 70% off. And escalating breaks the cache, roughly 7x in my numbers, which is a cost the model price sheets never show you. The part that stung most was where the coder spend went. 72% of it, $3,218, went to tasks that ended up canceled. One "fix broken tests" task ran 76 attempts and burned $940 on its own. The deepest autofix chain got 19 levels deep before I killed it. So here is where I landed. When your default is already cheap, a router is a quality dial, not a savings dial. Cost per shipped thing is the number that matters, cost per request is just vanity. If you built one too, check which way it actually routes before you trust any savings number. The proxy that logged all this is open source.