Why I built Zabio

Six months ago I didn’t know I needed an AI router. To be honest, I didn’t even know what one was.

I was coding some personal projects, and a few tools for RemarkableCloud, the managed hosting company I’ve run since 2001. I mostly used Claude, and I still do. But I kept hitting tasks where Claude wasn’t the best fit. No problem, I thought. I’ll add another vendor for those. Another key, another model.

Then another. And another.

One model is never enough

Before long I had keys scattered across projects, a different setup for each vendor, and code full of small decisions about which model should handle what. Every app turned into a little switchboard. And every month, the bill grew.

AI is more expensive than it looks

Most people don’t feel how expensive AI really is, because the subscriptions are a great deal. Let’s be honest: Claude at 20, 100 or 200 dollars a month is still good value.

It’s a different story when you put AI inside your own apps. Once you’re making hundreds of thousands of calls a month, the bill is in the thousands. And one small mistake, like sending simple jobs to your most expensive model, can send that bill through the roof. The opposite mistake, sending hard jobs to a model that can’t handle them, quietly breaks your app.

I needed two things: a sane way to manage many vendors and keys, and a way to stop overpaying for every call.

Discovering routers

That’s when I found AI routers. I started with a popular AI router, and I liked it. One key, and the key management nightmare was gone.

But my bill was still high. The router made it easier to call models; it didn’t make the calls any cheaper. Picking the right model for each job was still my problem.

That’s when I thought: I can do this better.

Models come and go

There was one more thing I didn’t see coming: how fast models change. New ones launch almost every week, prices move, and last month’s best choice quietly stops being one. Keeping up with that by hand, app by app, is a job of its own.

Zabio keeps up for you. Every request is matched to the model that does that job best for the money, so when a better or cheaper model arrives, your apps benefit without you touching a line of code.

Stopping everything else

So I stopped. I put my other projects and products on hold and focused on one thing: routing.

I explored every technique I could find to lower the bill. Smart routing, where each request is read and sent to the cheapest model that can do that job well, instead of one model for everything. Caching. Just the right amount of reasoning for each job, not the maximum. And one idea I couldn’t find anywhere else, which became Smart Splitting.

Zabio really shines on data-heavy work. Say you send a big batch of logs and ask what went wrong. Smart Splitting has a cheap model extract the lines that matter, checks that nothing important is missing, and lets the strong model analyze only those, instead of paying top price to read every line. And when the analysis is simple enough, routing sends the whole job to a cheap model, which costs even less. The same works for long documents like contracts and reports: in our tests, questions about contracts cost 57 to 66% less. As far as we know, no other router does it.

I also wanted pricing you can check in your head. Zabio adds a small service fee to every call, plus a small fixed fee when it picks the model for you. We take no cut of what routing saves: every cent stays in your pocket. The current numbers are on our pricing page.

The router was the product

My plan was simple: build a router to power my own AI products. Somewhere along the way I realized the router was the product: a router tuned for one thing, saving you money.

That’s how Zabio was born.

About the name

Zabio comes from sabio, the Spanish word for wise. And let me tell you: Zabio is wise. It reads every request and makes a small, careful decision about where it should go.

Later I found out the word means something in Croatian too. Zabio means “scored,” as in scoring a goal.

Well. We did.

Guillermo, founder of Zabio

Start free on Zabio, no card needed, or paste one of your own requests into the playground and see what it would cost.