Nadir vs Requesty · verified 28 October 2026

Requesty bundles a gateway. Nadir can stay beside yours and make the model-and-effort decision auditable. Cited from their docs, including where they win.

Questions answered on this page

What is the difference between Nadir and Requesty?
Requesty bundles a gateway. Nadir can stay beside yours and make the model-and-effort decision auditable. Requesty is an LLM gateway for 600+ models across 30+ providers, with routing policies, a free tier, EU data residency on every plan, and automatic prompt caching.
How does Requesty decide which model to use?
Routing policies you define and call by name: failover chains, weighted load balancing, and latency routing on live time to first token and generation speed. Auto Routing, in beta, sends the first user message to a decision model that scores your plain-language route labels, then pins the chosen model for the session. Nadir decides from a trained difficulty classifier over the prompt, the candidate menu, policy, cache, context, and session economics.
What does Requesty do after the model answers?
Nothing. Routing is decided before generation, fallbacks fire only on errors, and a successful response is returned without a quality check. Nadir's decision-only mode returns before generation. On the managed, non-streaming path a complete response can enter a reference-free verifier and escalate when it misses the configured bar. Streaming bypasses that post-generation cascade.
What does Requesty cost compared with Nadir?
Requesty: 5% markup on model cost, 0% on your own provider keys. No seat fee, no minimum. Free tier is 200 requests a day on free models. Guardrails are billed per token scanned. Nadir has no base fee. Credits for Nadir-managed keys draw down at provider list price, with a 5.5% platform fee (8% on Business) added when you buy them. On your own keys, your provider bills you directly and Nadir adds no fee. Routing savings carry no fee, and shadow and recommendation-only deltas are advisory estimates that are never billed.
What does Requesty do well?
EU data residency on every plan, including Free. A flat 5% on model cost and a usable free tier. Auto Routing (beta) on plain-language route labels you can test before shipping.
Why pick Nadir over Requesty?
Two coding prompts can need Haiku and Opus. Requesty's Auto Routing, in beta, tells them apart only through route labels and a threshold you write and tune. Nadir's trained classifier scores difficulty with no labels to write. Nadir can recommend a model and reasoning effort inside the gateway or agent the customer already runs. Every recommendation carries a decision receipt; projected economics remain advisory until execution and outcomes make them measurable. Nadir publishes no universal deployed savings or quality percentage. The 60% cost and 98% quality-preserved RouterBench result, measured on 11,420 held-out triples, is a reference-assisted research ceiling rather than the live reference-free path.
How do I trial Nadir against Requesty?
Keep Requesty exactly as it is. Write down the model, reasoning effort and monthly spend it produces today, and pick a week of real traffic, or a set of requests you can grade, as the baseline. Call Nadir's decision API from the same place that calls Requesty, in shadow mode. It returns the model, effort, cache and policy recommendation with no provider call, so nothing about execution changes. Read the receipts against what actually ran, and report outcomes through the outcome endpoint. Projected savings stay advisory until you execute a recommendation and report measured usage. Enforce on one workload, keep Requesty as the route you fall back to, and widen only when the outcomes clear your own bar.

What Nadir is

Nadir is an LLM router. Nadir sends each prompt to the cheapest model that can handle it. A small decision model reads each prompt against your model menu and picks the lowest-cost model it expects to handle it. When the decision model is uncertain or unavailable, the request goes to the strongest model on the menu. The routing step makes no call to your model provider.

Nadir runs two ways. The decision API returns a model, reasoning-effort, cache, context, and policy recommendation without calling a model provider, beside the gateway you already run. That is how a shadow-mode evaluation works, and its projected savings stay advisory. The OpenAI compatible managed proxy executes the route, and migration is a two-line change: point the base URL at api.getnadir.com and set model to auto. On that path an optional verifier can score a complete non-streaming answer and escalate to a stronger model when it misses the configured bar. Streaming bypasses post-generation verification. BYOK is supported on every tier.

For coding agents, Nadir Auto is a terminal launcher for Claude Code or Codex that asks Nadir for the main-session model before each turn, with your configured model as the fallback and cost ceiling. Delegation integrations for Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor instead recommend a model tier for subagent work, and the agent decides; the Claude plugin can also move a main-thread turn to Haiku when Nadir's cache check prices it cheaper, unless its switch_main_model option is off. Either way inference runs on your own provider account, so Nadir holds no provider keys on that path.

What the numbers are, and what they are not

Nadir publishes each evaluation with its scope. On checkable code, run-check-escalate solved 392 of 395 common HumanEval and MBPP problems (99.2%), graded by running the canonical tests; that applies only to tasks with runnable deterministic tests. Nadir-Tumbler posts an arena_score of 72.3 on RouterArena's public scorer, 5th of 23 routers, which measures the routing decision on RouterArena's own model pool. A reference-assisted RouterBench evaluation over 11,420 held-out triples produced a 60% lower projected cost than always-Opus with about 98% retained quality and a 1.7% catastrophic-route rate. That experiment gave the verifier the expensive-model reference answer, which production does not have, so it is a research ceiling and not the deployed path.

None of these is a production guarantee, a universal savings rate, or a forecast for any particular workload. Customer savings are reported from measured execution against a declared baseline, and customer quality only from outcome-labelled traffic. Projected savings and realized savings are separate artifacts and are never blended.

Design-partner program

Three rungs, picked by risk appetite. Rung 0 Shadow runs advisory decision calls alongside live traffic and returns a projected receipt, with nothing in the request path changed. Rung 1 Hosted is the two-line swap on a production slice and returns a realized receipt. Rung 2 On-prem is a supervised six-week proof of concept inside the partner's VPC, where no prompt, response, or usage reaches Nadir. The commitments are the same at every rung. Apply for a rung directly: Rung 0 Shadow, Rung 1 Hosted, or Rung 2 On-prem. Not sure which fits? Start at getnadir.com/contact/?reason=design-partner.

Licensing

NadirClaw is the self-hosted core, source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License. Source-available is the correct label; NadirClaw is not open source. Nadir Route's hosted plan has no base fee and charges a variable fee only on measured savings from requests Nadir executed.

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