Hybrid LLM Routing: Ollama + Claude API Without Quality Degradation

The bill arrives at the end of the month You ship a bot. Claude responds well, the client is happy. The first month goes by quietly. Then you open Anthropic billing: $200+ for traffic from a small café. You dig into the logs. 60,000 requests over a month. "Are you open on Sundays?", "What's your address?", "Is delivery free?" — thousands of times. Every single one routed through Claude Sonnet with a 400-token system prompt. This isn't a model cost problem. It's an architecture problem: a uniform...