Vercel AI Gateway: $5 Free Monthly, Zero Markup on Paid Tier (2026)

Why It Matters

Vercel gives every account $5/month in free AI model credits. Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.4 Mini, GLM-5.2 — they’re all on the free tier. Just add a credit card and skip the hassle of signing up at each provider.

But the real story isn’t the $5. Vercel AI Gateway’s paid tier has a hard promise: zero markup. You pay the same price going through Vercel as you would buying directly from the source. Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) routing through Vercel is also free.

What It Is

AI Gateway is a unified API aggregator. Vercel wraps models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Zhipu, MiniMax, StepFun, and others behind a single interface. One API key, every model.

Beyond the unified endpoint, Gateway handles multi-provider failover automatically. If Anthropic goes down while you’re calling Claude, the system switches to a backup provider — no retry logic needed on your end.

What the Free Tier Gets You

$5/month, resets every 30 days. Doesn’t sound like much, but these models cost fractions of a dollar per million tokens. Running tests, building small tools, or hooking up a personal bot — $5 lasts.

Free tier limits: subset of models (not the full catalog), lower rate limits than paid, and you wait for the next cycle once credits run out.

Where to Find It

Scroll down the left sidebar in the Vercel dashboard. Click AI Gateway.

Free Model List

The AI Gateway model page lets you sort by Free Tier. Here’s what’s currently free:

Model	Capabilities	Released
anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5	Text + Image + Reasoning	2025-10-15
minimax/minimax-m3	Text + Image + Reasoning	2026-05-31
zai/glm-5.2	Text + Image	2026-06-16
openai/gpt-5.4-mini	Text + Image + Reasoning	2026-03-17
stepfun/step-3.7-flash	Text + Image + Reasoning	2026-05-28
openai/gpt-oss-120b	Text + Reasoning (Open Source 120B)	2025-08-05
openai/text-embedding-3-small	Text Embedding	2024-01-25

Claude Haiku and GPT-5.4 Mini are popular lightweight picks — enough for daily chat and code generation. GLM-5.2 is Zhipu’s newest model from June, strong with Chinese. MiniMax M3 and StepFun 3.7 Flash are solid domestic options. GPT-oss-120B is a 120B-parameter open source model you can call for free — that’s a good deal.

Is the Paid Tier Worth It?

The free credits are a door opener. Vercel AI Gateway’s paid tier has some notable features — whether it’s worth it depends on your needs:

Zero markup. Same price as going direct. Vercel doesn’t add a cent.

BYOK (Bring Your Own Key). Paid users can bring their own API keys and route them through Vercel’s gateway for failover and traffic management.

Full model catalog. Paid unlocks everything, not just the free subset.

Higher rate limits. No more 429s in production.

Vercel’s play here isn’t making money on model calls. They’re selling the engineering: unified interface, multi-provider failover, traffic management.

How to Get Started

1. Sign up for a Vercel account (email or GitHub)
2. Go to the dashboard, click AI Gateway in the left sidebar
3. Add a credit card (no prepaid cards — there’s a small verification charge under $1 that gets refunded)
4. Grab your API key, start calling

The card is for unlocking the free tier and paid access. If you only want the free $5, don’t exceed it and you won’t be charged.

Who It’s For

If your project calls multiple models and you don’t want to manage separate API keys at each provider — this fits. Or if you’re prototyping AI apps and want to swap models fast to compare results, one gateway does it.

Already have working API keys at each provider? The free $5 is a decent backup channel. The paid tier’s zero-markup and free BYOK routing are more valuable for production setups that need multi-provider failover.

Direct link: Vercel AI Gateway Model List