Vercel AI Gateway Free Tier

Overview

Vercel AI Gateway is a managed gateway that routes requests to 200+ models across providers through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint at https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/chat/completions, with zero markup on token prices — you pay the provider's list price. Every Vercel team account includes a free tier with a recurring monthly credit, announced at $5 of credits every 30 days, which starts when you make your first AI Gateway request.

Free Tier Quotas & Limits

• Monthly included credit: $5 every 30 days (per the GA announcement) — a recurring credit, not a time-limited trial.
• Model subset: the free tier covers a subset of the catalog, not all models. Browse the free-tier model list for the current set; other models require purchased AI Gateway Credits.
• Rate limits: free-tier requests are rate limited per model with lower limits than the paid tier. Exceeding a limit returns a 429 and the same request can be retried after a short wait.
• Once you purchase AI Gateway Credits, your team moves to the paid tier and the monthly free credit no longer applies.

Key Free Models

Free-tier-eligible models currently include:

• fish-audio/s1, fish-audio/s2-pro, fish-audio/s2.1-pro (speech) and fish-audio/transcribe-1 (transcription)
• inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-fin, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante, inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-vl (chat)
• poolside/laguna-s-2.1-free (chat)

How to Get Started

1. Create a Vercel account — AI Gateway works from any environment, not just Vercel deployments.
2. Add a valid payment method to your team to use free credits.
3. Create an AI Gateway API key from the dashboard and export it as AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY.
4. Call a free-tier model via the AI SDK, OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions, Anthropic Messages, or run npx vercel@latest ai-gateway coding-agents setup to route a coding agent through the gateway.

Eligibility

Any Vercel team account. A 403 with customer_verification_required means the team must add a payment method before using free credits.