How does UberLLM decide which provider serves my request?

It ranks every seller of the model you named by live price, filters out any that are unhealthy, and sends the request to the cheapest healthy one. If that seller fails before output starts, the request is retried on the next cheapest healthy seller.

What does "healthy" mean in routing?

A seller that is currently serving successfully — not erroring, rate-limiting, or probing unhealthy. Health is tracked from real traffic and background probes, and unhealthy sellers are skipped so "cheapest" never means "broken".

Am I charged if the chosen provider fails?

No. A failure before any output has streamed is retried on the next healthy seller, and a request that returns no result costs $0.

How UberLLM routing picks the cheapest healthy provider

For each request, UberLLM looks up every seller offering the model you named, ranks them by live price, and sends the request to the cheapest one that is currently healthy. If that seller fails before any output has streamed, the request is retried on the next cheapest healthy seller — so you get the lowest available price without losing reliability, and you are never billed for a failed attempt.

Published Oct 24, 2026Updated Oct 24, 2026

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The one-sentence version

Cheapest healthy seller, decided per request. Both words carry weight: cheapest, so you pay the lowest live price; healthy, so you do not get routed to a seller that is erroring or slow.

Step by step

Resolve the model. The model id you send maps to one logical model (old ids keep resolving to their current replacement, so links and code do not rot).
Gather the sellers. UberLLM collects every active offer for that model — the gateway’s own curated route plus any seller-pool offers listed on the marketplace.
Rank by live price. Offers are ordered by their current price. The price you are quoted already includes UberLLM’s 10% fee, so ranking and billing use the same number.
Filter to healthy. Sellers that are failing, rate-limiting, or probing unhealthy are skipped. Health is tracked continuously from real traffic and background probes.
Send to the cheapest healthy seller. The request goes to the top survivor of steps 3–4.
Fail over before output. If that seller errors before any tokens have streamed to you, the request is retried on the next cheapest healthy seller. A request that ultimately returns no result costs $0.

Why "healthy" is not optional

A pure cheapest-wins router sends you to whichever seller underprices everyone — including a seller that is cheap because it is broken. UberLLM’s health filter is what makes "cheapest" safe: the live board surfaces each provider’s reliability, and you can inspect it yourself on the uptime page. Routing uses the same signal.

What you can see

The live price per model, fee included — pricing board.
Which models get the most traffic — rankings.
Provider reliability over time — uptime.

For sellers

The same mechanism is the seller side of the marketplace: list spare capacity for a model, stay healthy and competitively priced, and requests route to you. See how selling works and the sellers doc.