OpenRouter

OpenRouter is one account that sits in front of hundreds of AI models, from the big famous ones to small, fast ones that answer easy questions for fractions of a penny.

Why it matters

When you're classifying thousands of scraped pages, most of the questions are easy. "Is this golf course private or public" is not a hard question, and you don't need a frontier model to answer it 16,000 times. A small model answers it just as well for a tiny fraction of the cost. That's the difference between a $200 run and a $2 run.

When to reach for it

When the page count gets big. Reading one page? Just use Claude and don't think twice. Sorting thousands of pages into buckets, pulling one field out of each, scoring them against a checklist? Route that through a small model on OpenRouter and save Claude for the judgment calls.

Worth knowing

You don't write any of the plumbing yourself. Tell Claude "use a cheap model on OpenRouter for the classification step" and it writes the script, batches the pages, and reports the cost. You just create the account and fund it with a few dollars.