The weakest line in most agent routers is a small LLM told to "reply with only one word." Sometimes it replies with "coding" plus a paragraph, and a strict parser sends a coding prompt to the cheap model.
Cloudflare's Clef removes that failure. It scores the options you give it in one pass, generates no tokens, and bills input only: $0.038 per million on Clef-flash. In one public build it routed 200 of 200 test requests correctly.
That builder kept his 0.7 confidence threshold, his fallback flag and his "unsure goes to Sonnet" rule anyway. Clef replaced the classifier call. The policy is still yours to write and tune. And on Cloudflare's own RouterBench run it ties TypeSafe's Jev (79.7 vs 79.9), so the case for switching is price, the free tier, images or open weights, not better routing.
Prices, outside latency tests, the routing policy I'd start from and a four-step check on 200 of your own requests: Cloudflare Clef Makes Your Agent Router Obsolete
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