What's free
Free tier: $5/month credit covering a subset of models (Free Tier eligible models) at lower rate limits
Rate limits
Free tier is rate-limited per model (HTTP 429 on exceed), lower than paid; routes to many providers rather than hosting models itself
The catch
The monthly $5 credit is stated in Vercel's own docs. Once you purchase credits, your account moves to the paid tier and the monthly free credit no longer applies. BYOK is not available on the free tier.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1", api_key="<YOUR_FREE_API_KEY>")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="<a-free-model>",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)…or with curl:
curl https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"<a-free-model>","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'Appears in
Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-30) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-08-14 Updated free tier, the catch
- 2026-07-30 Updated free tier, rate limits, the catch
- 2026-07-30 Added to the hub