How We Built DigitalOcean Inference Router

2026-05-22

DigitalOcean's Inference Router is an infrastructure-level tool that automatically routes AI requests to the most appropriate model, reducing costs by avoiding expensive frontier models for simple tasks. Powered by Plano, an open-source AI proxy with a 30B Mixture-of-Experts routing model, it outperforms GPT-5.1 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 in routing accuracy, resolving intent in approximately 200ms.