OmniRoute Tiers — User Guide

OmniRoute organizes the 352 supported providers into 3 economic tiers. Each request travels through them in order until one returns successfully — you get the cheapest viable response without ever writing fallback code.

Tier 1 — Subscription

Providers you already pay for. OmniRoute uses every drop of quota before it expires.

Provider	Why Tier 1
Claude Code OAuth	Anthropic Pro/Team — flat-rate, often unused
OpenAI Codex (ChatGPT subscription)	Plus/Team includes Codex quota
GitHub Copilot	Per-seat — quota resets monthly
Cursor IDE	Pro plan quota
Antigravity / Devin Desktop	Built-in quotas

Strategy: route here first for every request that fits the model’s strengths. The quota tracker monitors approaching resets, and the reset-aware combo strategy prioritizes accordingly. To route Tier 1 first and only step out to paid tiers as quota runs out, use the auto/thrifty id — or auto/subscription to stay on plan-included capacity and fail closed instead. See Subscription-first routing.

Tier 2 — Cheap

Pay-per-token providers under $1/1M tokens. Reserved for high-volume work or after Tier 1 quotas hit limits.

Provider	Price (input/output)	Strengths
DeepSeek V4 Pro	$0.27 / $1.10 per 1M	Code, reasoning
GLM-4.5	$0.60 / $2.20 per 1M	Long context
MiniMax M1	$0.20 / $1.10 per 1M	Speed
Qwen Coder	$0.30 / $1.20 per 1M	Code
OpenRouter (price-optimized)	varies	100+ models, dynamic

Strategy: combo cost-optimized picks lowest $/token model that meets the task’s capability filter (vision, JSON mode, tools, max-context).

Tier 3 — Free

Zero-cost providers — free tiers, credit programs, OAuth daily quotas.

Provider	Free quota / credits
Kiro AI	Free Claude tier (generous fair-use)
OpenCode Free	No auth, generous rate limits
Qoder	Free OAuth
Google Vertex AI	$300 new-account credits
Amazon Q	Free tier for AWS users
Pollinations	Open public API
Cloudflare AI	Workers AI free tier

Strategy: combo auto with budget cap routes here when Tier 1+2 fail or when useFreeOnly=true is set. Free providers often have weaker rate limits — circuit breaker recovers them on backoff.

Configuring tiers

Dashboard → Tiers → assign your providers. Defaults (from tierDefaults.json) are sensible; edit when you have specific subscriptions to prioritize or providers to exclude.

Auto-Combo’s 16-factor scoring also considers tier. See docs/routing/AUTO-COMBO.md.

Telemetry

Dashboard → Usage shows tokens spent per tier per day. Use this to:

• Confirm Tier 1 is utilized fully (otherwise you’re wasting subscription value)
• Identify which Tier 2 models are picked most (consolidate to 1-2)
• Verify Tier 3 saves money on test/exploration workloads

Common patterns

Pure-free workload

{
  "strategy": "auto",
  "config": { "auto": { "weights": { "costInv": 0.5, "tierPriority": 0.3 } } }
}

Forces strongly towards Tier 3; only uses Tier 2 if Tier 3 is unavailable.

Subscription-first with cheap fallback

{
  "strategy": "priority",
  "targets": [
    { "provider": "claude-code-oauth", "weight": 1 },
    { "provider": "deepseek", "weight": 1 },
    { "provider": "kiro", "weight": 1 }
  ]
}

Explicit ordered list matching Tier 1 → Tier 2 → Tier 3.

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OmniRoute source repository (a58000c7685f)