Why it matters
Routing is pitched as the cure for runaway token bills, yet if it wrecks caching it can inflate them. With Anthropic’s inference margins reportedly 70% and $20/100/200 plans heavily subsidized, buyers chasing per-token savings may be tuning the wrong layer.
Tokenmaxxing read
The counterintuitive lever is caching, not routing. Van Klinken expects provider-side routing — staying inside one vendor to keep the cache warm — to win, deepening lock-in. Uber reportedly spent a full year’s AI budget within four months on Claude Code tokens before it clicked.
Source takeaway
Erik van Klinken (Techzine Global): a month ago buyers still reached for the largest model 95% of the time; with Fable 5 priced at twice per token of Opus 4.8, he bets vendors’ own routers, not third-party ones, capture the efficiency trade.
