Routing Preferences
How to think about lowest price, highest reliability, lowest latency, and official-only routing.
RouteMarket can accept a request-time routing preference to influence how it ranks candidate routes.
Supported first-pass values
The current design centers around these values:
lowest_pricehighest_reliabilitylowest_latencyofficial_only
lowest_price
Use this when your main goal is cost efficiency.
RouteMarket will prefer lower-cost eligible routes after policy and health filtering.
Good fit for:
- batch workloads
- internal tooling with flexible latency needs
- price-sensitive high-volume usage
Example:
{
"model": "gpt-5.4",
"routing_preference": "lowest_price"
}highest_reliability
Use this when success rate matters more than absolute cost.
RouteMarket will bias toward healthier and more stable routes.
Good fit for:
- production user-facing flows
- automation that must avoid flaky sources
- critical business operations
Example:
{
"model": "gpt-5.4",
"routing_preference": "highest_reliability"
}lowest_latency
Use this when response time matters most.
RouteMarket will bias toward lower-latency eligible routes.
Good fit for:
- interactive UX
- chat surfaces
- low-wait-time product experiences
Example:
{
"model": "gpt-5.4",
"routing_preference": "lowest_latency"
}official_only
Use this when you want RouteMarket to avoid non-official provider paths and keep routing within official-compatible sources.
Good fit for:
- stricter compliance needs
- more conservative rollout policy
- situations where source class matters more than price
Example:
{
"model": "gpt-5.4",
"routing_preference": "official_only"
}Important note
A routing preference is not a blind override.
RouteMarket still applies:
- key and project policy
- route visibility
- health filtering
- capability filtering
- budget and quota checks
That means a preferred route can still be rejected if it is not allowed or not healthy.
Practical guidance
A simple default strategy is:
- start with no explicit preference
- use
highest_reliabilityfor production critical flows - use
lowest_pricefor cost-sensitive background jobs - use
lowest_latencyfor interactive paths - use
official_onlywhen source class matters most