Every engineering team starts the same way: npm install openai.
It works great for the prototype. But as you scale to thousands of documents a day, your bill explodes. You are locked into one vendor, paying retail prices, with zero redundancy.
DocsRouter changes the equation.
The Middleware Advantage
DocsRouter sits between your application and the AI providers. This allows us to do things a direct integration can't:
1. Smart Caching
If you extract data from the same document twice, why pay twice? DocsRouter hashes every document and caches the result for 24 hours. For workflows with repetitive uploads, this alone reduces costs by 15%.
2. Waterfall Routing
Why use a $10 model to read a $0.001 difficulty receipt?
DocsRouter can attempt the extraction with a cheap model like Mistral 7B first. If confidence is high, you save money. If confidence is low, we automatically retry with GPT-5.2. This "waterfall" approach saves 30-60% on token costs.
3. Unified Billing
Instead of managing API keys and credit cards for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Mistral, you get one bill from DocsRouter.
Case Study: Fintech Unicorn
A major Neo-bank switched to DocsRouter last month.
- Before: $45,000/month (Direct GPT-4o)
- After: $26,000/month (DocsRouter Balanced Strategy)
They didn't change a line of business logic. They just changed their API endpoint.