@blockrun/clawrouter 0.12.257 → 0.12.259
This diff represents the content of publicly available package versions that have been released to one of the supported registries. The information contained in this diff is provided for informational purposes only and reflects changes between package versions as they appear in their respective public registries.
- package/README.md +34 -30
- package/dist/cli.js +538 -142
- package/dist/index.js +538 -142
- package/dist/router/index.js +43 -30
- package/docs/9-free-ai-models-zero-cost-blockrun.md +79 -86
- package/docs/anthropic-cost-savings.md +4 -4
- package/docs/anthropic-third-party-harness-changes.md +4 -4
- package/docs/clawrouter-cuts-llm-api-costs-500x.md +1 -1
- package/docs/clawrouter-vs-openrouter-llm-routing-comparison.md +4 -4
- package/docs/features.md +9 -8
- package/docs/routing-profiles.md +27 -23
- package/docs/subscription-failover.md +1 -1
- package/package.json +3 -3
- package/scripts/benchmark.py +2 -2
- package/scripts/reinstall.sh +7 -5
- package/skills/clawrouter/SKILL.md +4 -4
- package/src/top-models.json +11 -4
package/dist/router/index.js
CHANGED
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@@ -552,6 +552,13 @@ var DEFAULT_MODEL_CAPABILITIES = Object.freeze({
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supportsTools: true,
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supportsVision: true
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},
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"cohere/north-mini-code": {
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contextWindow: 256e3,
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supportsVision: false
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},
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"deepseek/deepseek-chat": {
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supportsVision: true
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// supportsTools:
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"nvidia/llama-3.2-11b-vision": {
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"nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b": {
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"nvidia/nemotron-nano-9b-v2": {
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"nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b": {
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"nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning": {
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// supportsTools: gateway unavailable at probe time — fails closed; override: 2026-08-29 probe: every request (6 plain + 3 tool attempts) returned a gateway 500, so the probe measured an incident, not the model. Codex's function calling is established by the 2026-07 Terminal-Bench / tau2 calibration trajectories in portfolio.ts. Hosts observing the 500s should drop it with RouterOptions.unavailableModels rather than this snapshot claiming the model cannot call tools.
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// $0.20/$1.25, 1M ctx
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"google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite",
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// $0.10/$0.40
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"nvidia/
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// FREE backstop — NVIDIA free tier (probed 2026-08-
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"nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning"
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// FREE backstop — NVIDIA free tier (probed 2026-08-30)
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]
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},
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MEDIUM: {
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// Eco tier configs - absolute cheapest (blockrun/eco)
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ecoTiers: {
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SIMPLE: {
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primary: "nvidia/
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// FREE — NVIDIA free tier flagship
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primary: "nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning",
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// FREE — NVIDIA free tier flagship, 1M ctx
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fallback: [
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// FREE —
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"nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b",
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// FREE — fastest free model (~121 tok/s)
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// The free head keeps rotting with NVIDIA's hosting (deepseek-v4-flash
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// 410 2026-08-12, seed-oss-36b 410 2026-08-03, gpt-oss-120b/20b 400
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// 2026-08-21
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//
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// 2026-08-21, and on 2026-08-30 FOUR of the five visible free models at
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// once — step-3.7-flash, nemotron-nano-9b-v2 and nemotron-nano-12b-v2-vl
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// all 410, mistral-nemotron hung). Each retirement retargets the two
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// free rungs to the current free tier; the paid rungs below never move.
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// The head follows blockrun's own redirect of the model it replaces, so
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// the router and the gateway never name different models.
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"google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite",
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// $0.10/$0.40 — cheapest paid rung
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// strongest open-weight reasoner
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// Cheap, reliable
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// NVIDIA free ultimate backstop
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]
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},
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// retail high-risk 3/3
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// NVIDIA free ultimate backstop
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]
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},
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# 9 Free AI Models, Zero Cost: How BlockRun Gives Developers Top-Tier LLMs for Nothing
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> **The count in this title is a snapshot
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> published free tier is
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> **The count in this title is a snapshot, and so is every model name below.**
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> It was 9 when this was written; the published free tier is <!-- br:models.free -->7<!-- /br:models.free --> today, and _none_ of the
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> nine originals is still in it. Free hosting is volatile — NVIDIA retired four
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> of the five visible free models in a single sweep on 2026-08-30 — so the tier
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> gets rebuilt rather than topped up. The URL keeps its original slug so existing
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> links do not break. Current figures, always:
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> [blockrun.ai/brand/numbers.json](https://blockrun.ai/brand/numbers.json); the
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> live catalog is [blockrun.ai/api/v1/models](https://blockrun.ai/api/v1/models).
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## The Cost Problem Nobody Talks About
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You're not just paying for intelligence. You're paying for every mistake, every retry, every discarded attempt.
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**What if you had
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**What if you had a handful of high-quality LLMs — completely free, unlimited calls, up to 1M context — and could use them right now?**
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BlockRun's answer: just take them.
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---
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## The Lineup:
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## The Lineup: <!-- br:models.free -->7<!-- /br:models.free --> Models, $0.00
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Through [ClawRouter](https://github.com/BlockRunAI/ClawRouter) — BlockRun's local AI routing proxy — you get zero-cost access to the following:
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Through [ClawRouter](https://github.com/BlockRunAI/ClawRouter) — BlockRun's local AI routing proxy — you get zero-cost access to the following (verified live 2026-08-30):
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| **Mistral Small 4 119B** | 131K | — | Fast multilingual chat |
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| **Nemotron 3 Nano Omni** | 256K | ✅ | Vision — text + image + video + audio |
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| Model | Context | Reasoning | Best For |
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| ---------------------------- | ------- | --------- | ------------------------------------------ |
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| **Nemotron 3.5 Lightning** | 1M | ✅ | The free default — thinking-mode reasoning |
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| **Nemotron 3 Nano 30B** | 131K | ✅ | Fastest free model (~121 tok/s) |
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| **Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B** | 1M | ✅ | Largest free model — 550B / 55B active MoE |
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| **Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B** | 256K | ✅ | Strong generalist (text only in practice) |
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| **Llama 3.2 11B Vision** | 128K | — | Meta Llama (text only in practice) |
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| **Cohere North Mini Code** | 256K | ✅ | Coding, sub-second responses |
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| **Poolside Laguna XS 2.1** | 131K | — | Coding, ~161 tok/s |
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**Price: $0.00 per million tokens. Input free. Output free. No hidden fees. No daily caps. No trial period.**
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BlockRun's business model is simple: **make the best models accessible, charge only for the premium ones.**
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The free models are BlockRun's foundation tier. They cover the vast majority of everyday developer tasks — chat, coding, translation, summarization, lightweight reasoning — without costing a cent. When you need heavier firepower (Claude Opus 4, GPT-4o, o3), BlockRun charges per-call via [x402 micropayments](https://www.x402.org/). No subscriptions, no monthly minimums — just pay for what you use, only when you need to.
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The free tier isn't a loss leader. It's the product. BlockRun believes baseline AI capability should be accessible to every developer, regardless of budget. The premium tier exists for tasks that genuinely demand it.
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ClawRouter classifies every incoming request into one of four complexity tiers:
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| Tier | Typical Tasks | ECO Route (Cheapest)
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| ------------- | ------------------------------------- |
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| **SIMPLE** | Formatting, translation, Q&A | 🆓
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| **MEDIUM** | Summaries, analysis, general coding |
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| **COMPLEX** | Architecture, complex code |
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| **REASONING** | Mathematical proofs, multi-step logic | DeepSeek
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| Tier | Typical Tasks | ECO Route (Cheapest) | AUTO Route (Balanced) |
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| ------------- | ------------------------------------- | -------------------------------- | --------------------- |
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| **SIMPLE** | Formatting, translation, Q&A | 🆓 Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (FREE) | Gemini 2.5 Flash |
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| **MEDIUM** | Summaries, analysis, general coding | GLM-5.3 Flash ($0.15/$0.50) | Gemini 3.5 Flash |
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| **COMPLEX** | Architecture, complex code | GLM-5.3 Flash ($0.15/$0.50) | Gemini 3.1 Pro |
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| **REASONING** | Mathematical proofs, multi-step logic | DeepSeek Reasoner ($0.14/$0.28) | Claude Sonnet 5 |
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The SIMPLE tier — the bulk of everyday traffic — costs nothing, and the paid ECO rungs are cents. Note what changed since this was written: ECO used to route three of four tiers to free models. It no longer does, and that is deliberate. Paid value-tier models got cheap enough ($0.14–$0.15 per million input tokens) that routing hard work to a free model is a worse trade than paying a fraction of a cent for one that will not time out.
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### Real-World Cost Comparison
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## Deep Dive: What Each Free Model Does Best
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### Nemotron 3.5 Lightning — The Free Default
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A 30B-A3B mixture-of-experts model with a **1M-token context** and thinking-mode reasoning. It is what `/model free` pins and what ECO's SIMPLE tier opens on. Roughly 35 tokens/second, and a 1M window is unusual at any price, let alone $0.
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**Best for:** Long-context reasoning, multi-step planning, anything where the input is big. If you remember one free model name, remember this one.
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### Nemotron 3 Nano 30B — The Fast One
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The **fastest free model in the catalog** — around 121 tokens/second on realistic workloads, not just short pings. Returns reasoning content. When you are iterating rapidly and each round-trip is a tax on your attention, this is the one to pin.
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**Best for:** Rapid iteration, prompt engineering, high-volume light tasks.
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### Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B — The Big One
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550 billion total parameters, 55B active, 1M context — the **largest free model ever listed**. It is genuinely strong, and it is genuinely slower than the rest of the tier; treat it as the one you reach for when the task is hard rather than the one you leave pinned.
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**Best for:** Complex analysis and deep reasoning where you would otherwise pay.
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### Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B — Strong, and Text-Only in Practice
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31B / 3.2B active MoE, 256K context. Both gateways catalogue it as vision-capable and its benchmark card is real (ChartQA 90.3, DocVQA 95.6, MMMU 70.8) — but **the image path does not work through either gateway**, so ClawRouter treats it as text-only. See "There Is No Working Free Vision" below.
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Five of the seven are reasoning-capable and handle most tasks well. On the hardest problems — competition-level math, formal proofs, deep multi-step planning — they don't match Claude Opus 5 or Sonnet 5. That's why ClawRouter's REASONING tier doesn't use free models.
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ClawRouter therefore ships no `vision` flag on any free model, so requests carrying an image route to a paid vision model instead. The general lesson is worth more than the specific finding: **a catalog's capability list is a claim, not a measurement** — and one passing sample is not a measurement either. The first probe here returned the right colour; it took four to see that was luck.
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This is the real limitation, and it is worth more than the other two. On 2026-08-30 NVIDIA retired four of the five visible free models in one sweep, and none of the nine models this article originally listed is still in the tier. Free capacity comes from whatever a provider is willing to give away this quarter. Pin a free model if you like — but build so that losing it costs you a config line, not a rewrite. That is the entire argument for putting a router in front of them.
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- **2026:** BlockRun offers <!-- br:models.free -->7<!-- /br:models.free --> free models through a single API
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**
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**A free tier that gets rebuilt rather than retired isn't just a product feature — it's a signal.** Baseline AI capability is becoming infrastructure. Like internet bandwidth before it, the cost of "good enough" AI inference is converging toward zero.
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BlockRun and ClawRouter exist to be the **routing layer** in this transition: not locked to any single provider, not bound to any single model, always giving developers the lowest-cost path to the right capability.
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Today it's <!-- br:models.free -->7<!-- /br:models.free --> free models, and they are not the same seven as last month. Tomorrow it could be 50. Prices will only drop. Capabilities will only improve. The names will keep churning.
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Point your `base_url` to `http://localhost:8402/v1`. That's the whole setup.
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_Model lineup refreshed for ClawRouter v0.12.258 (2026-08-30). Model availability changes often — the table above is a snapshot, the catalog endpoint is not. For the latest information, visit [blockrun.ai](https://blockrun.ai)._
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## The Solution: ClawRouter
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[ClawRouter](https://github.com/BlockRunAI/ClawRouter) is an open-source local proxy that sits between your app and <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->
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[ClawRouter](https://github.com/BlockRunAI/ClawRouter) is an open-source local proxy that sits between your app and <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->76<!-- /br:models.chatVisible --> AI models. It saves you money in three ways: **smart routing**, **token optimization**, and **response caching**.
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|
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┌─────────────┐ ┌──────────────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
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"What is the capital of France?"
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→ SIMPLE → free/nemotron-3.5-lightning (FREE)
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→ SIMPLE → free/nemotron-3.5-lightning (FREE)
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→ COMPLEX → anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6 ($3/$15)
|
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ClawRouter is an open-source local proxy that sits between your agent and <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->
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ClawRouter is an open-source local proxy that sits between your agent and <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->76<!-- /br:models.chatVisible --> LLM models across 9 providers. It analyzes every request across 15 dimensions and routes it to the cheapest model that can handle it — in under 1ms, entirely locally.
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|
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|
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**Result: <!-- br:savings.autoVsBaselinePct -->84<!-- /br:savings.autoVsBaselinePct -->% cheaper than pinning Claude Opus 5 for every request** — the published figure, priced on a stated workload mix rather than estimated.
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|
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<p align="center"><img src="assets/blockrun-clawrouter-x402-usdc-micropayment-wallet-budget-control.png" alt="Budget limits enforced by physical construction — wallet loaded via Base/Solana, pay per call across <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->
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<p align="center"><img src="assets/blockrun-clawrouter-x402-usdc-micropayment-wallet-budget-control.png" alt="Budget limits enforced by physical construction — wallet loaded via Base/Solana, pay per call across <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->76<!-- /br:models.chatVisible --> models, balance hits zero and the valve shuts cleanly" width="720"></p>
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ClawRouter pays for inference via [x402](https://x402.org/) USDC micropayments (Base or Solana). You load a wallet. Each inference call costs exactly what it costs. When the wallet runs low, requests stop cleanly.
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|
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|
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ClawRouter maintains a curated catalog of <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->
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ClawRouter maintains a curated catalog of <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->76<!-- /br:models.chatVisible --> models across 9 providers (including <!-- br:models.free -->7<!-- /br:models.free --> free models), updated with each release. Delisted models have automatic redirect aliases:
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|
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| **Model catalog** | Laggy, silent drops | Curated <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->
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| **Model catalog** | Laggy, silent drops | Curated <!-- br:models.chatVisible -->76<!-- /br:models.chatVisible --> models, redirect aliases |
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| **Average cost** | $25/M tokens (Opus direct) | auto-routed = **<!-- br:savings.autoVsBaselinePct -->84<!-- /br:savings.autoVsBaselinePct -->% savings** |
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CHANGED
|
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|
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/model reasoner # deepseek/deepseek-reasoner
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|
187
|
-
/model kimi #
|
|
187
|
+
/model kimi # moonshot/kimi-k2.7; /model kimi-k3 for the 1M-ctx flagship
|
|
188
|
+
/model glm # zai/glm-5.3
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|
188
189
|
/model gemini # google/gemini-2.5-pro
|
|
189
190
|
/model flash # google/gemini-2.5-flash
|
|
190
|
-
/model grok # xai/grok-
|
|
191
|
+
/model grok # xai/grok-4.5
|
|
191
192
|
/model grok-fast # xai/grok-4-fast-reasoning
|
|
192
193
|
```
|
|
193
194
|
|
|
@@ -197,12 +198,12 @@ All aliases work with `/model blockrun/xxx` or just `/model xxx`.
|
|
|
197
198
|
|
|
198
199
|
## Free Tier Fallback
|
|
199
200
|
|
|
200
|
-
When your wallet balance hits $0, ClawRouter automatically falls back to the free model (`
|
|
201
|
+
When your wallet balance hits $0, ClawRouter automatically falls back to the free model (`nemotron-3.5-lightning`):
|
|
201
202
|
|
|
202
203
|
```
|
|
203
204
|
Wallet: $0.00
|
|
204
205
|
Request: "Help me write a function"
|
|
205
|
-
→ Routes to
|
|
206
|
+
→ Routes to nemotron-3.5-lightning (FREE)
|
|
206
207
|
→ No "insufficient funds" error
|
|
207
208
|
→ Keep building while you top up
|
|
208
209
|
```
|