Tokenless (YC S26) Launches a Turn-by-Turn Model Router

Tokenless launched out of YC’s Summer 2026 batch with an API gateway that routes agent traffic between models dynamically, turn by turn, to cut spend. The premise is that most turns in an agent loop are cheap — file reads, formatting, routine tool calls — and do not need the model the hard turns need. The obvious risk is that the router itself becomes the quality ceiling, and that frontier vendors ship the same routing internally for free. The launch drew 58 points and 50 comments, most of them arguing about exactly that.