What's free
Free tier: a monthly free credit covering a subset of models (Free Tier eligible models) at lower rate limits
- Credit card
- not required
- Phone verification
- not confirmed
- Commercial use
- not confirmed
Free limits
Numeric limits are not recorded in structured form for this provider.
In the provider's words
No numeric free-tier limit published: the free tier has a lower per-model limit than paid (HTTP 429 when exceeded); Vercel documents behavior, not numbers
The catch
A monthly free credit is stated in Vercel's docs (https://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/pricing, read 2026-10-09); the amount is not stated there. 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. It routes requests to many providers rather than hosting models itself. models_free is a sample, not the full list: the first language model, by id, of each of the first eight providers in alphabetical order among the models flagged availableToFreeTier in the page data of https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models, joined with type language in https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/models and excluding priority-tier variants (isFast) and the synthetic free copy (isSyntheticFreeTier) (131 such models from 30 providers, read 2026-10-09T03:00Z; the catalogue changes). We did not verify that the rendered ?freeTier=true filter matches that field. Five models priced at zero that spend no credit are tagged free in the API: convaiinnovations/laya, convaiinnovations/laya-free (evaluation type, not chat), inclusionai/ling-3.1-flash, inclusionai/ling-3.1-flash-free and poolside/laguna-s-2.1-free.
Free models · sample
alibaba/qwen-3-14bamazon/nova-2-liteanthropic/claude-3-haikuarcee-ai/trinity-large-thinkingbytedance/seed-1.6callstack/apexcohere/command-adeepseek/deepseek-r1A sample of models reachable on the free tier — the live catalog changes. Pull the current set with GET https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/models.
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="alibaba/qwen-3-14b",
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":"alibaba/qwen-3-14b","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'Appears in
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Change history
How this free tier has changed since we started tracking it (2026-07-30) — generated from the git history of providers.json.
- 2026-10-09 Updated free tier, the catch
- 2026-10-08 Updated rate limits, the catch
- 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