How Meliai Routes Your Requests to EU Inference Providers

Every time you send a request to Meliai, the platform evaluates all available European providers in real time and selects the one that best fits your priorities — balancing cost, latency, and environmental impact. Routing is fully automatic, so your code doesn’t need to change as providers are added or removed. You control the tradeoff by choosing a routing flavor, either by appending a suffix to your model ID or by setting a preset field in your request body.

The five routing flavors

Each flavor applies a different weighting across three dimensions: price, speed, and environmental impact. Meliai scores every candidate provider against these weights and routes to the winner.

Flavor	Price weight	Speed weight	Environment weight	Best for
`balanced`	40%	40%	20%	Default for chat; reasonable across all three dimensions
`speed`	20%	70%	10%	Latency-sensitive apps, chat UIs, and agentic loops
`price`	70%	20%	10%	Bulk workloads; default flavor for embeddings
`eco`	20%	20%	60%	Minimizing carbon footprint and water usage
`batch`	80%	5%	15%	Async discounted work via the Batches API

How to choose a flavor

Method 1: Suffix the model ID

Append :flavor directly to the model ID in your request. This is the simplest and most portable approach — it works with any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible client without any custom parameters.

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key=os.environ["MELIAI_API_KEY"],
    base_url="https://api.meliai.ai/v1",
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b:eco",   # :eco suffix selects the eco flavor
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise the water cycle in two sentences."}],
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: process.env.MELIAI_API_KEY,
  baseURL: "https://api.meliai.ai/v1",
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b:eco",   // :eco suffix selects the eco flavor
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Summarise the water cycle in two sentences." }],
});

console.log(response.choices[0].message.content);

curl https://api.meliai.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MELIAI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b:eco",
    "messages": [
      { "role": "user", "content": "Summarise the water cycle in two sentences." }
    ]
  }'

Method 2: Use the `preset` field

Pass a preset value in the request body to hint at the type of workload. Accepted values are "reasoning" and "non_reasoning". Meliai uses this to further refine provider selection within the active flavor.

{
  "model": "qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b:speed",
  "preset": "reasoning",
  "messages": [
    { "role": "user", "content": "Prove that the square root of 2 is irrational." }
  ]
}

If you specify both a model-ID suffix and a preset field, the suffix takes precedence. For example, model: "qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b:price" with preset: "reasoning" routes using the price flavor.

Automatic failover

If a provider returns an error or exceeds its response-time threshold, Meliai automatically retries with the next-best provider according to the active flavor’s scoring. This happens transparently — your client receives a single response with no visible retry logic. To see which provider ultimately served your request, inspect the environment_impact.provider_id and environment_impact.location fields in the response:

{
  "environment_impact": {
    "provider_id": "hetzner-fsn1",
    "location": "DE",
    "energy_kwh": 0.00041,
    "carbon_g_co2": 0.082,
    "water_liters": 0.0003,
    "renewable_percent": 78,
    "pue": 1.2
  }
}

If every provider in the pool fails, the API returns error code INFERENCE_3103. This is rare; check the status page if you encounter it repeatedly.

Use the :eco flavor to bias routing toward providers powered by higher proportions of renewable energy. Combined with the environment_impact response block, this gives you an auditable record of the carbon footprint of every inference call.

Overview

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Features

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How Meliai Routes Your Requests to EU Inference Providers

The five routing flavors

How to choose a flavor

Method 1: Suffix the model ID

Method 2: Use the `preset` field

Automatic failover

​The five routing flavors

​How to choose a flavor

​Method 1: Suffix the model ID

​Method 2: Use the preset field

​Automatic failover

The five routing flavors

How to choose a flavor

Method 1: Suffix the model ID

Method 2: Use the `preset` field

Automatic failover