Vercel AI Gateway
Unified gateway to hundreds of LLMs via a single Vercel key. Zero token markup, BYOK support, automatic fallbacks, observability, and native AI SDK integration.
Regional availability·40 regions
- us-east-1 (Vercel default)
- us-west-2
- eu-west-1 Dublin
- eu-central-1 Frankfurt
- ap-southeast-1 Singapore
- ap-northeast-1 Tokyo
- ap-south-1 Mumbai
- sa-east-1 Sao Paulo
Description
Vercel AI Gateway is a unified API gateway to hundreds of LLMs from multiple providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Mistral, Cohere, Nvidia NIM, Groq, Together, Fireworks, Perplexity, and others) served through a single Vercel key. The product was announced at Ship AI in May 2024, with general availability (GA) in 2025. Core value: a developer can switch between models and providers by changing model: 'anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5' to model: 'openai/gpt-5-1' with no code changes and no need to create separate accounts with each provider.
Key features: (1) Zero token markup - Vercel adds no margin; token prices match provider prices exactly. (2) BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) - the user can use their own provider key through the gateway; tokens are billed directly by the provider, and Vercel provides routing/monitoring/observability for free. (3) Automatic fallback - if one provider fails, the gateway automatically reroutes to an alternate provider for the same model (e.g. Anthropic Claude via Anthropic → Bedrock → Vertex). (4) Provider options - explicit routing, provider preferences, a fallback list configurable per request. (5) Embeddings - support for vector embeddings (OpenAI, Cohere, Voyage). (6) Web search tool - augmenting model responses with real-time web search built into the gateway. (7) Observability - per-request metrics: model, provider, latency, cost, input/output tokens, aggregate spend dashboards.
API and integrations: AI Gateway supports three main API formats - (a) native Vercel AI SDK (open-source TypeScript, streamText, generateObject, useChat), (b) OpenAI Chat Completions API (drop-in replacement for clients using the OpenAI SDK - just change the base URL), (c) OpenAI Responses API (newer OpenAI API from 2025), (d) Anthropic Messages API (drop-in for Anthropic clients). Framework integrations: Next.js, React, Svelte/SvelteKit, Nuxt, Astro, Remix. Supported modalities: text-in/text-out, image-in (vision), image-out (generation), video-in/video-out (providers: Runway, PixVerse, Google Veo), embeddings.
Authentication and BYOK: the gateway supports two auth models: (1) OIDC access tokens generated by the Vercel account (recommended - short-lived, auto-rotated) and (2) classic API keys (longer static keys). BYOK lets the customer maintain a direct billing and contractual relationship with the model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), while still benefiting from the Vercel layer for routing, observability, prompt caching, and disallow-prompt-training. Ideal enterprise scenario: OIDC + BYOK + opt-in prompt logging per project + custom per-team rate limits.
Market position and competition: AI Gateway competes directly with OpenRouter (both offer a unified LLM API, but OpenRouter runs a marketplace of 400+ models with a slight markup, while Vercel is zero-markup with BYOK), Portkey, Anyscale Aviary (more enterprise-focused), LiteLLM (open-source proxy). Vercel AI Gateway wins on native integration with Next.js/AI SDK (~3M weekly downloads), zero-markup pricing, and built-in observability in the Vercel console. Announced roadmap (Q3-Q4 2026): coding agents on top of AI Gateway, native RAG orchestration, wider multi-modal support.
MLOps LifecycleMLOps LifecycleFull model lifecycle: registry, feature store, prompt management, monitoring and human-in-the-loop.
Model Registry
Feature Store
Prompt Management
Monitoring
Human-in-the-Loop
Data & KnowledgeData & Knowledge ManagementData connectors, vector database integration, native vector search and data management (PII, provenance, synthetic data).
ApplicationsAI ApplicationsDomains and use cases this platform is best suited for — from RAG and fine-tuning to scientific research.
SecurityEnterprise SecurityCertifications, access controls and data-protection features essential for corporate deployments and cloud privacy compliance.
Developer EcosystemDeveloper EcosystemDeveloper resources: available SDKs, supported programming languages, and infrastructure features and model-deployment methods.
Pricing & Business ModelPricing & Business ModelBilling models (usage-based, provisioned throughput), resource limits and SLA parameters (uptime, support tiers).
Pricing models
Resource quotas
SLA & Support