Claude Bill Cut 60x by Routing Bulk Tasks to Small Local Models
r/ClaudeAI·medium signal
A developer analyzed their Claude API usage and found most spend went to trivial tasks — classifying files, reformatting JSON, pulling fields from text, summarizing docs. By routing these to a small local model, they cut their bill by 60x while reserving Claude for tasks that actually need frontier reasoning. The post (85 upvotes, 16 comments on r/ClaudeAI) validates the emerging 'model routing' pattern where task complexity determines which tier handles it.