Quickstart

Route Tools is one API for every agent tool. You send a normalized request to https://api.route.tools/v1/tools/{category}; we route it to the cheapest, fastest, or best provider for that category and return a normalized response — with automatic failover if a provider errors, times out, or rate-limits.

1. Get an API key

Sign up at route.tools/dashboard — new accounts include $2 of free credits. Create a key; it looks like rt_live_....

2. Make a call

curl https://api.route.tools/v1/tools/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer rt_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "cloudflare durable objects pricing",
    "max_results": 5,
    "routing": { "sort": "price" }
  }'

{
  "id": "req_01...",
  "category": "search",
  "provider": "serper",
  "result": {
    "results": [
      { "title": "...", "url": "https://...", "snippet": "..." }
    ]
  },
  "usage": { "price": 0.0012, "latency_ms": 642, "units": 1 },
  "routing": {
    "sort": "price",
    "attempted": [{ "provider": "serper", "status": "ok", "latency_ms": 642 }]
  }
}

The routing.attempted array shows exactly which providers were tried, in order — if the first choice failed, you’ll see the failover chain.

3. Pick a routing dimension

routing.sort	Behavior
price	Cheapest available provider first (default)
latency	Fastest provider by live p50, measured over the last 5 minutes
quality	Highest-quality provider for the category

Tool categories

Category	Endpoint	What it does
Search	POST /v1/tools/search	Web search
Scrape	POST /v1/tools/scrape	URL → markdown/html/text
Parse	POST /v1/tools/parse	Documents (PDF, images) → markdown
Image	POST /v1/tools/image	Text → image
Code	POST /v1/tools/code	Sandboxed code execution

Discover live availability and pricing programmatically with GET /v1/tools.

Using an MCP client instead of raw HTTP? See MCP setup.