I burned $87 on a single weekend in March. Not because my OpenClaw agent did anything wrong — because every single tool call hit my paid primary model, including the ones that were checking the weather for a cron job that didn't need it.
Then OmniRoute crossed my feed this week showing 1B tokens routed for $0, and I realized I had been doing routing wrong for months. Not the mechanics — those were fine. The decisions were wrong. I was routing based on "is the model up?" instead of "what is this call actually trying to learn?"
Here's the routing decision tree I built, the three cron failures it prevented, and the bill that went from $87/week to single digits.
The Routing Mistake Everyone Makes
OpenClaw's fallback chain is per-call, sequential, and stops at the first success. That's the whole mental model most people carry around. Primary model → fails → try next → fails → try next → succeed.
