Vercel AI Gateway free tier: limits and models

What Vercel AI Gateway's free tier allows

Every Vercel team account receives $5 of AI Gateway credits per month on the free tier, usable only against the Free Tier model subset rather than the full catalogue. Free tier requests are additionally rate limited per model with lower limits than the paid tier, and Vercel does not publish those per-model numbers. Credits start counting from your first Gateway request.

Published limits: Published as a credit balance
Free access type: Free trial credit
Credit card: Not required
Protocol: OpenAI-compatible at https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1
Lifecycle: Active
Sources reviewed: 2026-07-25

Purchasing AI Gateway credits moves the team to the paid tier, which serves the full model catalogue plus bring-your-own-key routing.

Where Vercel AI Gateway sits in this catalog

Vercel AI Gateway is one of 3 free trial credit entries among the 25 providers detailed here. It asks for no credit card, which is true of 23 of the 25. It publishes no fixed request count, as 16 of the 25 do not.

Compared with	Published limits	Card	Endpoint
Vercel AI Gateway (this page)	Published as a credit balance	Not required	`ai-gateway.vercel.sh`
IBM watsonx.ai	Enforced but not published	Not required	`us-south.ml.cloud.ibm.com`
Cerebras Inference	5 requests per minute	Required	`api.cerebras.ai`

Models Vercel AI Gateway lists as free

Free Tier eligible model subset — not part of any family this catalog tracks across providers
openai/gpt-oss-120b — gpt-oss, also free at 9 other providers here
moonshotai/kimi-k2 — Kimi, also free at 1 other provider here

9 other providers here also host the gpt-oss family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: GroqCloud, SambaNova Cloud, Cloudflare Workers AI, Hugging Face Inference Providers, Fireworks AI, Ollama Cloud, Cerebras Inference, Together AI, Scaleway Generative APIs. 1 other provider here also host the Kimi family on free terms, and the terms are not the same: Moonshot AI (Kimi).

Checking a Vercel AI Gateway key

The CORS preflight echoes the requesting origin and allows an Authorization header, so a browser can call this endpoint directly. That was measured against https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh on 2026-07-25.

So a key can be checked in the browser checker without installing anything. If you would rather not paste a key into a web page, this does the same thing:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
set -eu

: "${VERCEL_AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY:?Set VERCEL_AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY to a key you created yourself at the provider console}"

# Prints the models this key can reach, then the HTTP status on its own line so
# 200, 401, and 429 stay distinguishable.
curl --silent --show-error \
  --write-out '\nHTTP %{http_code}\n' \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $VERCEL_AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY" \
  'https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/models'

Using a Vercel AI Gateway key

Vercel AI Gateway serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1. Point any client that accepts a custom base URL at it, and let the client read the key from VERCEL_AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY so the value never lands in a config file:

# Merge this snippet into ~/.codex/config.toml.
# Project-level config cannot select a custom model provider.
model = "openai/gpt-oss-120b"
model_provider = "vercel-ai-gateway"

[model_providers.vercel-ai-gateway]
name = "Vercel AI Gateway OpenAI-compatible gateway"
base_url = "https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1"
env_key = "VERCEL_AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY"
wire_api = "responses"

Questions about the Vercel AI Gateway free tier

Does Vercel AI Gateway ask for a credit card?

No. Vercel AI Gateway is one of 23 providers here that hand out free access without a card, so the only cost of trying it is the signup.

What are Vercel AI Gateway's free-tier rate limits?

Vercel AI Gateway publishes no single free-tier number: its limits are published as a credit balance. This catalog leaves that blank rather than guessing a figure.

What happens when a Vercel AI Gateway key hits the limit?

The endpoint answers 429. That is a statement about the request that was refused, not about how much quota is left; only a reset header from the provider tells you when it clears.

Is the Vercel AI Gateway free tier going away?

Nothing in Vercel AI Gateway's own documentation says so as of 2026-07-25. Purchasing AI Gateway credits moves the team to the paid tier, which serves the full model catalogue plus bring-your-own-key routing.

Can Vercel AI Gateway be used with Codex, Cline, or Continue?

Yes. Vercel AI Gateway serves the OpenAI chat completions protocol at https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1, so any client that accepts a custom base URL can use it. Claude Code is the exception, because it speaks the Anthropic protocol instead.

Official sources

AI Gateway pricinghttps://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/pricing
AI Gateway getting startedhttps://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/getting-started
AI Gateway modelshttps://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/models-and-providers

Every figure above was read from those pages on 2026-07-25. Where a provider states a limit only inside a console, this catalog records that fact instead of a number. See the methodology for how an entry gets in and how it gets corrected.