Local-first routing for AI agents

Why the next layer of AI infrastructure lives close to your agents

Teams running serious agents usually combine hosted frontier models, local Ollama routes, private endpoints, and provider-specific subscriptions. The problem is not access to one more model. The problem is that every harness has a separate fallback story, a separate model picker, and a different failure mode when a provider rate-limits, slows down, or goes dark.

Sage Router takes a different bet: routing is local-first infrastructure for access you already control.

The problem with one bill and one marketplace

Hosted model marketplaces are convenient, but they can trade away three things agentic teams care about:

Custody. Provider keys, BYOK policy, and traffic often move into a hosted control plane.
Control. Teams cannot always define routing policy, fallback order, or local-vs-cloud preference the way they can with their own providers.
Local models. Local Ollama and private Tailnet models are usually outside the natural path of a hosted marketplace, even though they are often the cheapest reliable fallback.

What local-first routing means

Sage Router runs on your machine, server, Tailnet host, or hosted control plane. It exposes one OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Your tools point at it. The router can:

Select models by task type, capability, latency, context size, multimodal requirements, and policy.
Fail over across authorized providers when one is down, slow, or rate-limited, without switching models mid-stream.
Route local Ollama, Ollama Cloud through local Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, NVIDIA NIM, private gateways, and OpenRouter BYOK routes.
Keep provider credentials local by default, while hosted Sage Router generated keys manage account access, quotas, and analytics.
Emit route telemetry so operators can see which provider/model actually served a request.

For Codex and coding agents

Use one base URL and stable profiles such as sage-router/frontier while routing behind the scenes across healthy authorized providers.

For local Ollama fallback

Keep local models in the fallback chain for privacy, cost control, and continuity when cloud providers rate-limit.

For hosted teams

Hosted Sage Router adds generated keys, quotas, analytics, health checks, and reliability routing without advertising bundled model resale.

A 30-second local start

python3 router.py --port 8790
export OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8790/v1
export OPENAI_API_KEY=local-router
codex --model openai/gpt-4.1

Now every Codex request can be policy-routed across your providers and local models. You did not rewire Codex; you swapped the model layer underneath it.

Commercial boundary

The local core is free and open source. Hosted Sage Router monetizes routing convenience: generated keys, quotas, provider health monitoring, hosted dashboards, uptime checks, and reliability routing. Public plans do not bundle provider resale; customers remain responsible for authorized provider access.

Next steps

Start with the hosted API quickstart, configure Codex, compare Sage Router vs OpenRouter, or estimate routing fit with the calculator.