Policy vs direct eventual success rate, Jan-Apr 2026
Policy vs direct eventual success rate, Jan-Apr 2026
Routing policies let Requesty users define fallbacks and load balancing - if one provider errors, the request automatically retries on the next. 'Direct' means a single provider with no fallback. This chart shows eventual success rate at the request level.
How much does using a routing policy improve LLM reliability? In April 2026 the Requesty managed-fallback policy cohort hit 99.25% eventual success rate, vs 85.01% for users calling a single provider directly. That is a 14.2 pp lift, up from a +3.0 pp gap in January. Policy reliability held a tight 97.5-99.3% band across all four months while the direct cohort swung 12 pp; the widening is driven by direct-cohort regressions, not policy degradation.
Why it mattersA managed fallback chain absorbs upstream provider incidents that direct callers experience as user-visible failures. Over the four months of 2026 plotted here, direct callers gave up 12 percentage points of reliability while the policy cohort barely moved. Same upstream events, opposite outcomes. That is the clearest measurable case for using an LLM gateway over calling provider APIs directly.
Key findings
- 01Policy reliability widened its lead over direct from +3.0 pp in January to +14.2 pp in April.
- 02April 2026: policy 99.25%, direct 85.01%. Policies eliminated 14 percentage points of failures that direct customers absorbed.
- 03Policy rate has held a tight 97.5-99.3% band for four months. Direct rate swings 12 pp (97.5% in Feb to 85.0% in Apr) because direct calls have no fallback to absorb provider-side incidents.
- 04The Mar-Apr widening is driven by direct-cohort regressions, not policy degradation. Policies absorbed the same upstream issues through their fallback chain.
Data
| Month | Policy - eventual success(percent) | Direct - eventual success(percent) |
|---|---|---|
| January | 97.50% | 94.50% |
| February | 98.72% | 97.47% |
| March | 98.55% | 86.72% |
| April | 99.25% | 85.01% |