DigitalOcean's Model Evaluations feature (now in Public Preview) lets teams benchmark AI inference strategies before changing production traffic. The guide walks through comparing three candidates on a legal assistant workload: a single frontier model (Claude Sonnet), an Inference Router with a cost/latency-optimized policy using multiple models, and a fine-tuned BYOM model from Hugging Face. It covers dataset preparation, evaluation configuration (system prompt, temperature, judge model), metric selection (correctness, completeness, ground truth faithfulness, safety), and how to interpret results across quality, latency, and cost dimensions. The approach enables reproducible, data-driven routing decisions without A/B testing in production.
