NadirClaw is live · free plan, paid from $4.99/org · last verified 23 Oct 2026 · viability healthy
NadirClaw
Nadir is an LLM router that sends each prompt, and each Claude Code or Codex turn, to the cheapest model that can still do it.
Start at Rung 0 Shadow: nothing in your request path moves and you get a projected receipt before you flip production to model: auto. What earns trust is the honesty — the 60% RouterBench reduction is labeled a research ceiling because the verifier saw the expensive model's reference answer, and NadirClaw is called source-available, not open source. Judge it on your own realized receipt, not the benchmark.
Verdict generatedVerified 7d ago · liveness 81/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/nadirclaw
- Platform teams with real Claude, GPT, and Gemini spend who want a measured savings receipt before touching production
- Teams already running LiteLLM, OpenRouter, or Portkey who want advisory routing before changing the gateway
- Organizations that need prompts, responses, and usage to stay inside their own VPC on the on-prem rung
- Claude Code or Codex users who want per-turn model selection with a hard cost ceiling
- Workloads that are almost entirely streaming, where post-generation verification is skipped
- Teams that require an OSI-approved open-source license for commercial self-hosting
- Accounts whose absolute monthly savings are too small for a savings-share or platform fee to pay off
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Skip Nadir if your traffic is entirely streaming, since the verifier only scores complete non-streaming answers, or if an OSI-approved open-source license is a hard requirement for commercial self-hosting.
Pricing fits teams whose model spend is big enough that a savings share still leaves you ahead — the vendor's own example keeps $6,900 of $8,000 in gross savings at 25%/10%. Below a few hundred dollars a month of API spend the fee math rarely adds up. Against peers, Hosted Route carries no base fee where gateways like Portkey and LiteLLM Cloud charge subscription or per-request pricing, and NadirClaw self-hosting is $0 under PolyForm Noncommercial, versus open-source LiteLLM which is free for
Our "biggest gripe" note written Oct 13, 2026 quotes $2,000, which no longer matches the verified price table, so it is being re-reviewed and is not shown.
In short
NadirClaw — Nadir is an LLM router that sends each prompt, and each Claude Code or Codex turn, to the cheapest model that can still do it. Best for Platform teams with real Claude, GPT, and Gemini spend who want a measured savings receipt before touching production, Teams already running LiteLLM, OpenRouter, or Portkey who want advisory routing before changing the gateway, Organizations that need prompts, responses, and usage to stay inside their own VPC on the on-prem rung. Free to start; paid plans from $4.99/org.
What is NadirClaw?
NadirClaw — Nadir is an LLM router that sends each prompt, and each Claude Code or Codex turn, to the cheapest model that can still do it. Best for Platform teams with real Claude, GPT, and Gemini spend who want a measured savings receipt before touching production, Teams already running LiteLLM, OpenRouter, or Portkey who want advisory routing before changing the gateway, Organizations that need prompts, responses, and usage to stay inside their own VPC on the on-prem rung. Free to start; paid plans from $4.99/org.
Nadir is an LLM router aimed at teams whose Claude, GPT, and Gemini API bills have turned into a recurring argument. A small decision model reads each incoming prompt against your model menu and picks the lowest-cost model it expects to handle the work, attaching a recommendation for reasoning effort, cache, context, and policy. The routing step itself never calls your provider. If the decision model is uncertain or unavailable, traffic falls through to the strongest model on your menu instead of gambling on a cheap wrong answer. It deploys two ways. The Decision API returns the recommendation beside the gateway you already run — the shadow-mode path, where nothing in your production request path changes and projected savings stay advisory. The OpenAI-compatible managed proxy actually executes the route, and migration is a two-line swap: point your base URL at api.getnadir.com and set model to auto. On that path an optional verifier scores a complete non-streaming answer and escalates to a stronger model when it misses your bar; streaming skips post-generation verification entirely. Coding agents get their own door. 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 both fallback and cost ceiling. Delegation integrations for Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor recommend a model tier for subagent work and leave the final call to the agent; the Claude plugin can shift a main-thread turn to Haiku when a cache check prices it cheaper. Inference runs on your own provider account there, so Nadir holds no provider keys. The self-hosted core, NadirClaw, is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License — the vendor is explicit that it is not open source. Against LiteLLM, OpenRouter, or Portkey, Nadir pitches itself as a decision layer that sits beside your gateway rather than a replacement gateway with budget enforcement baked in.
Key features
- Routes each prompt to the cheapest model on your menu expected to handle it
- Decision API returns model, reasoning-effort, cache, context, and policy recommendations
- Routing decision makes no provider call — returns a recommendation only
- OpenAI-compatible managed proxy that executes the routed request
- Two-line migration: point base URL at api.getnadir.com and set model to auto
- Optional verifier scores complete non-streaming answers and escalates on a miss
- Streaming bypasses post-generation verification
- Nadir Auto terminal launcher picks the Claude Code or Codex main-session model per turn
- Delegation integrations for Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor recommend a subagent model tier
- Claude plugin can move main-thread turns to Haiku when cache pricing favors it
- BYOK on every tier, with provider keys staying in your environment
- Hosted provider keys available via pay-as-you-go credits
- Rung 0 Shadow returns a projected savings receipt with no request-path change
- Rung 2 On-prem: six-week supervised PoC where no prompt, response, or usage reaches Nadir
- Self-hosted NadirClaw deployable on your own hardware under PolyForm Noncommercial
Behind the verdict
We'd reach for Nadir when the API bill is real money and someone above you wants proof before a config change. The shadow path is the smart first move: you run advisory decisions alongside live traffic, keep your gateway, and walk away with a projected receipt priced against a baseline you declare. That artifact is worth more in a budget conversation than any vendor benchmark. Where it bites is streaming. The verifier that catches a weak answer only sees complete non-streaming responses, so a workload that is almost all streamed tokens loses the safety net and runs on the router's judgment alone. If your traffic looks like that, test hard before committing. On pricing, the model is unusual and worth reading twice. With your own provider keys, Nadir adds no fee. With Nadir-managed keys you buy credits at provider list price plus a platform fee — 5.5% on Pay as you go, 8% on Business — so $1,000 of credits costs $1,055. No contract, no minimum spend. On-prem runs in your VPC on a yearly license at Business or Enterprise. The closest alternative depends on what you already own. Teams on LiteLLM or Portkey get routing and budget enforcement in one place; Nadir deliberately doesn't do that, and sells the decision layer separately. If you want a single gateway, stay put. If you suspect your gateway's static routing is leaving money on the table, Nadir measures that suspicion instead of asserting it. Coding-agent teams have the easiest case: Nadir Auto picks the Claude Code or Codex main-session model per turn with your model as the cost ceiling, and the plugin can slide main-thread turns to Haiku when caching makes it cheaper. Small absolute savings won't justify a savings-share fee, and anyone who won't declare a baseline spend can't be priced at all. Those two are real
Models under the hood
as of 2026-10-24
Limitations
- Nadir is a router, not a model — quality and savings depend on the models on your menu.
- The optional verifier only scores complete non-streaming answers, so streaming bypasses post-generation verification.
- Headline numbers are scoped by the vendor: the RouterBench figure (60% lower projected cost, ~98% retained quality, 1.7% catastrophic-route rate over 11,420 triples) is reference-assisted and not the deployed production path, the 99.2% code result (392 of 395 HumanEval/MBPP) applies only to tasks with runnable deterministic tests, and the RouterArena score of 72.3 measures routing on RouterArena's own model pool, not production workloads.
- NadirClaw is source-available under PolyForm Noncommercial (not open source), free only for noncommercial use.
as of 2026-10-13
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Is NadirClaw still active?
NadirClaw is live · free plan, paid from $4.99/org · last verified 23 Oct 2026 · viability healthy.
Viability score
How well maintained and how widely used is NadirClaw? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →What's new in NadirClaw
Checked 5 days agoAcross the latest 8 updates: 4 feature updates, 1 launch and 3 news mentions.
Decision API returns model, reasoning effort, cache, context and policy recommendation without provider calls
Shadow-mode evaluation path runs beside an existing gateway; projected savings remain advisory. BYOK supported on every tier.
Managed OpenAI-compatible proxy executes routes; migration is a two-line swap
Point base URL at api.getnadir.com and set model to auto. Optional verifier escalates non-streaming answers; streaming bypasses verification.
Reference-assisted RouterBench eval: 60% lower projected cost than always-Opus at ~98% retained quality
Over 11,420 held-out triples, with a 1.7% catastrophic-route rate. Vendor calls it a research ceiling; production lacks the reference answer.
Run-check-escalate solved 392 of 395 HumanEval and MBPP problems (99.2%)
Verifier-graded result applies only to tasks with runnable deterministic tests; vendor states it is not a production guarantee.
Nadir-Tumbler scores 72.3 on RouterArena, 5th of 23 routers
Published arena score of 72.3 measures the routing decision on RouterArena's own model pool, not production workloads.
Delegation integrations for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor recommend subagent model tiers
Integrations recommend a model tier for subagent work and the agent decides; Claude plugin can move main-thread turns to Haiku when cache pricing favors it.
Nadir Auto terminal launcher routes Claude Code and Codex main-session models per turn
Terminal launcher queries Nadir for the main-session model before each turn, with the user's configured model as fallback and cost ceiling.
NadirClaw launches design-partner program with shadow, hosted and on-prem rungs
Three-tier partner program: Rung 0 advisory shadow mode, Rung 1 two-line hosted proxy, Rung 2 six-week on-prem PoC in the partner's VPC.
What do users say about NadirClaw?
What people actually say about NadirClaw — is it worth it?
Our community sentiment research written Jul 3, 2026 is more than 90 days old, so it is being re-reviewed against current data and is not shown.
How we verified this
Every listed fact about NadirClaw— pricing, features, links, status — is re-read from the vendor's own pages by our verification pipeline and each change is logged with a date; the last pass ran on 23 Oct 2026. Pages mix model-assisted synthesis with human review; see how we verify.
Verification history
We have re-verified NadirClaw 10 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — changed SSL certificate
- — changed limitations, pricing page
- — changed features, description, who it suits, summary, who should skip it, our verdict, pricing tiers
- — changed features, description, summary, our verdict, pricing tiers, who it suits, who should skip it
- — changed pricing page, models, platforms, limitations
- — changed pricing tiers, switching out, summary, use cases, limitations, who should skip it, switching in, setup time, pricing fit, our verdict, features, description, hidden costs
Showing the 6 most recent of 10 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
How much does NadirClaw cost in 2026?
NadirClaw: Free to start; paid plans from $4.99/org. Pricing last verified 23 Oct 2026.
Plans compared
Every published NadirClaw tier, its price as the vendor publishes it, who it fits, and what it adds over the tier below. The 12-month cost projection follows.
| Plan | Price | Billing | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay as you go | FreeVendor: “5.5% platform fee on credits; $0 fee on your own keys” | — | — |
| Nadir Lens Starter | Free | — | Small teams up to 5 org members who want to see what their prompt traffic is actually made of before setting routing policy.Adds: Starting entry point for Lens: prompt clustering for up to 5 members, metered per org member, free during early access. |
| Nadir Lens Team | $4.99/orgVendor: “$4.99 per org member/mo” | usage | Orgs past 5 org members that need prompt clustering across the whole engineering group and accept per-seat metering.Adds: Adds prompt clustering beyond 5 members at $4.99 per org member per month, currently free until Lens reaches general availability, metered separately from Route fees. |
| Business | Price not publishedVendor: “8% platform fee on credits” | — | — |
| Enterprise | Custom | quote | — |
| NadirClaw (self-hosted core) | Free | — | Teams with hard data-governance rules who need routing inside their own VPC and can work within PolyForm Noncommercial terms.Adds: Starting tier for self-hosting: $0, runs on your own hardware with no account, but not open source. |
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where NadirClaw's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Pricing fits teams whose model spend is big enough that a savings share still leaves you ahead — the vendor's own example keeps $6,900 of $8,000 in gross savings at 25%/10%. Below a few hundred dollars a month of API spend the fee math rarely adds up. Against peers, Hosted Route carries no base fee where gateways like Portkey and LiteLLM Cloud charge subscription or per-request pricing, and NadirClaw self-hosting is $0 under PolyForm Noncommercial, versus open-source LiteLLM which is free for
Our hidden-costs note written Oct 13, 2026 quotes $2,000, which no longer matches the verified price table, so it is being re-reviewed and is not shown.
Has NadirClaw's pricing changed?
No plan price for NadirClaw has moved since we began logging in Aug 2026; the pricing page is re-read on every verification pass.
Who should pick NadirClaw?
Pick NadirClaw if you are Platform teams with real Claude, GPT, and Gemini spend who want a measured savings receipt before touching production, Teams already running LiteLLM, OpenRouter, or Portkey who want advisory routing before changing the gateway, Organizations that need prompts, responses, and usage to stay inside their own VPC on the on-prem rung, Claude Code or Codex users who want per-turn model selection with a hard cost ceiling.
Look elsewhere if you are Workloads that are almost entirely streaming, where post-generation verification is skipped, Teams that require an OSI-approved open-source license for commercial self-hosting, Accounts whose absolute monthly savings are too small for a savings-share or platform fee to pay off, Teams that want routing and budget enforcement bundled in one gateway rather than a decision layer beside it.
Skip it if Skip Nadir if your traffic is entirely streaming, since the verifier only scores complete non-streaming answers, or if an OSI-approved open-source license is a hard requirement for commercial self-hosting.
GeneratedReal-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas NadirClaw actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Before touching production, they wire the Decision API beside the gateway already in the request path and let it score a week of real traffic, returning a model, reasoning-effort, cache, context, and policy recommendation per prompt without calling any provider.
Outcome: They get a projected receipt on declared baseline traffic and can take a savings number to finance without having changed a single production request.
They install the Nadir Auto terminal launcher for Claude Code, which asks Nadir for the main-session model before each turn, with their configured model as the fallback and cost ceiling, and inference still runs on their own Anthropic account.
Outcome: Boilerplate turns land on cheaper models while the ceiling keeps a bad routing decision from becoming an expensive one, and the team keeps its own provider keys.
They take Rung 2 On-prem, a supervised six-week proof of concept, and run NadirClaw inside their own VPC so no prompt, response, or usage reaches Nadir, using the run-check-escalate harness on tasks with runnable deterministic tests.
Outcome: They validate routing on their own codebase inside their own perimeter, then decide whether a commercial arrangement beyond the PolyForm Noncommercial license is worth pursuing.
Use cases
- Cut spend on high-volume coding-assistant traffic by routing boilerplate prompts to cheaper models.
- Run shadow-mode evaluation beside your existing gateway and get a projected savings receipt before changing anything.
- Swap a two-line base URL change to route a production slice through the managed proxy and get realized receipts.
- Self-host NadirClaw inside your VPC so no prompt, response, or usage data leaves your infrastructure.
- Use the Decision API to get a model plus reasoning-effort recommendation without calling a provider.
- Set a quality bar and let the verifier escalate only the non-streaming answers that miss it.
- Keep BYOK so your OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google keys stay in your own environment on any tier.
- Cluster prompts with Nadir Lens to see what your traffic is actually made of before you set routing policy.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of NadirClaw — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Decision API shadow mode is the fastest path — about 100 ms per call and you can be scoring real traffic the same day, with nothing in your request path changed. The hosted proxy is a two-line swap (base URL to api.getnadir.com, model to auto), so a production slice can be live in an afternoon once you have declared a baseline. Nadir Auto for Claude Code or Codex installs as a terminal launcher
Switching to or from NadirClaw
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From an always-frontier-model habit: start with the Decision API in shadow mode and get a projected receipt before you change a base URL.
- →From LiteLLM or OpenRouter: keep the gateway in place and let the Decision API return model and reasoning-effort recommendations beside it.
- →From Portkey: run Rung 0 Shadow alongside your existing gateway, then move a production slice with the two-line base URL and model: auto swap.
- →From a manual per-service model choice: point base URL at api.getnadir.com and set model to auto to hand routing to the decision model.
- →From direct provider SDKs on coding agents: switch to the Nadir Auto launcher for Claude Code or Codex and keep your own provider keys.
- ↗To LiteLLM: revert the base URL to your LiteLLM gateway and restore explicit model names in your config.
- ↗To Portkey or OpenRouter: point the base URL back at the gateway and re-enable your own routing rules and fallbacks.
- ↗To self-hosted NadirClaw: keep the same routing behavior but move execution inside your own VPC, subject to PolyForm Noncommercial terms.
- ↗To plain provider endpoints: drop model: auto back to explicit model IDs on each service and remove the routing hop.
Integrations
Resources & guides
- Documentationgetnadir.com
Docs · NadirClaw
Full product docs from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
Cookbooks · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
Faq · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
How It Works · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
Blog · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
Benchmarks · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
Techniques · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
Savings Calculator · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
Agent Skill · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
- Resourcegetnadir.com
Pricing · NadirClaw
Helpful link from getnadir.com
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 5 videos for “NadirClaw”, and we withheld 5: 5 could not be judged, because “NadirClaw” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about NadirClaw.
Official links
What are the best NadirClaw alternatives?
The closest alternatives to NadirClaw we list are LiteLLM, jev-codex-router and PromptUnit. Ranked by direct product-type match, not category overlap.
| Alternative | Pricing | Starts at | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| LiteLLM | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
| jev-codex-router | Free | Free | — |
| PromptUnit | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
Alternatives to NadirClaw
View all
LiteLLM
LiteLLM is a self-hosted AI gateway putting 140+ providers and 1,800+ models behind one OpenAI-compatible API.
jev-codex-router
Per-turn Codex model routing that picks the model and thinking depth for every call, not once per session.
PromptUnit
AI cost router that sends each LLM call to the cheapest model clearing your quality bar, then bills 20% of verified savings.
Tools that pair well with NadirClaw
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside NadirClaw, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
LiteLLM
LiteLLM is a self-hosted AI gateway putting 140+ providers and 1,800+ models behind one OpenAI-compatible API.
jev-codex-router
Per-turn Codex model routing that picks the model and thinking depth for every call, not once per session.
PromptUnit
AI cost router that sends each LLM call to the cheapest model clearing your quality bar, then bills 20% of verified savings.
NadirClaw vs its closest rival
NadirClaw's closest head-to-head is with Spider Cloud — Spider Cloud and NadirClaw solve entirely different problems. Choose Spider Cloud if you need fast, reliable web data for AI agents or RAG — its Rust engine, Browser AI commands, and 99.9% success rate make it a no-brainer for scraping at scale. Choose NadirClaw if you're a developer using LLM coding assistants and want to slash API costs by 40-70% with intelligent routing; but be ready to self-host. They complement each other: use Spider Cloud to collect data, NadirClaw to optimize LLM calls on that data. Verdict generated
Head-to-head comparisons
Nadirclaw vs Spider Cloud
Spider Cloud and NadirClaw solve entirely different problems. Choose Spider Cloud if you need fast, reliable web data for AI agents or RAG — its Rust engine, Browser AI commands, and 99.9% success rate make it a no-brainer for scraping at scale. Choose NadirClaw if you're a developer using LLM coding assistants and want to slash API costs by 40-70% with intelligent routing; but be ready to self-host. They complement each other: use Spider Cloud to collect data, NadirClaw to optimize LLM calls on that data.
GeneratedNadirclaw vs Voyage Ai
If you need high-accuracy embedding models for RAG on specialized domains (finance, legal) and have enterprise budget, Voyage AI is the clear choice. If you're a developer or team looking to slash LLM API costs by 40-70% via intelligent routing and self-hosting, NadirClaw delivers immense value for free. They solve different problems: one is premium retrieval, the other is cost-efficient LLM proxy. Your pick depends on whether you need better embeddings or cheaper API calls.
GeneratedNadirclaw vs Temporal Ai
Choose Temporal AI if you need rock-solid durability for AI agents and long-running workflows with automatic retries and human-in-the-loop. Choose NadirClaw if you use AI coding tools like Claude Code or Cursor and want to cut API costs 40-70% by routing simple queries to cheap models. They solve different problems—orchestration vs. cost-optimized routing.
GeneratedFrequently asked questions
Our FAQ answer written Oct 13, 2026 quotes $2,000, which no longer matches the verified price table, so it is being re-reviewed and is not shown.
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