OpenRouter cuts sales agent cost 96% and speeds deal cycle by a third

OpenRouter just pulled back the curtain on Rasp, a sales agent built on its own routing layer, Ori. It has been running for months on the company's five-person sales team. The numbers: roughly 600 hours returned to the team each month, deal cycle compressed 34% — from 71 days to 47 — and close rate up 2.6x. Daily cost collapsed from about $800 to $30 and keeps dropping as Ori automatically routes to cheaper models that still hit quality bars.

What Rasp actually does

Rasp handles every inbound lead: researches and scores it, routes non-sales inquiries to the right place, fires off the first email — 93% with zero human touch. Before each call it prepares a brief. After, it writes the summary from the transcript, updates most CRM fields, and only flags edge or sensitive cases for manual review. Net result: each rep picks up about two extra calls a day at the same prep level, and lead response time is now under a minute.

Where the numbers come from

The math is per demo. Before Rasp: 30 minutes prepping, 15 writing the summary, 30 updating CRM — 103 minutes total. With Rasp: 5, 2, and 7 minutes respectively — 44 minutes total. That's 59 minutes saved per demo. OpenRouter notes that some of the close-rate lift also came from pricing and market shifts in the same window, not just the agent.

Lessons from two earlier agents

Rasp isn't the first attempt. Ace (for AEs) and Dove (for BDRs) came first. They taught the team four principles: one pipeline for every task type with the task type as a parameter; feature flag every component, off by default; measure from day one or you can't measure retroactively; and put the interface in Slack because that's where the team lives, not in a separate dashboard. OpenRouter admits Rasp probably isn't the final version — and that's fine.

The layer that makes the savings possible

The engine underneath is Ori, a routing layer that swaps models in real time for cheaper ones as long as quality holds. That's what drives the cost from $800 a day to $30 and keeps pushing it down. Ori's Slack agents are expected to roll out to all users soon.