# AI Gateway: Production\-ready reliability for your AI apps **Published:** August 21, 2025 | **Authors:** Walter Korman , Harpreet Arora --- Building an AI app can now take just minutes. With developer tools like the [AI SDK](https://ai-sdk.dev/), teams can build both AI frontends and backends that accept prompts and context, reason with an LLM, call actions, and stream back results. But going to production requires reliability and stability at scale. Teams that connect directly to a single LLM provider for inference create a fragile dependency: if that provider goes down or hits rate limits, so does the app. As AI workloads become mission-critical, the focus shifts from integration to reliability and consistent model access. Fortunately, there's a better way to run. [AI Gateway](https://vercel.com/ai-gateway), now generally available, ensures availability when a provider fails, avoiding low rate limits and providing consistent reliability for AI workloads. It's the same system that has powered [v0.app](https://v0.app/) for millions of users, now battle-tested, stable, and ready for production for our customers. ## The case for flexibility AI capabilities have grown and changed with incredible speed. Reasoning, barely a concept a year ago, is now a standard capability across models. Tool use and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) went from experiments to widely adopted standards in under a year. An essential tool for success in AI is staying flexible and adapting to the new frontier. Whether AI native or leveraging AI integrations, teams want the ability to use the best model available at any given time while keeping systems composable and avoiding lock-in. Building in the flexibility to switch between models requires sophisticated engineering. APIs can fail without warning, rate limits vary by provider, and keys must be managed and secured per vendor. Even tracking spend means juggling multiple dashboards with different top-up programs and spend controls. Engineering around these failure modes is time-consuming and slows teams down. AI Gateway handles this complexity for you so you can scale confidently and quickly. ## Great developer experience, trusted infrastructure The AI SDK now sees more than 2 million downloads per week and powers apps like Browserbase and Perplexity. While AI SDK standardized provider APIs and made switching as simple as a single line of code, the harder problem is ensuring availability when a provider fails. The AI Gateway brings the same developer experience together with globally available, production-grade infrastructure. Swap a model string and you’re testing a new provider in seconds: ```jsx import { streamText } from 'ai' const result = streamText({ model: 'xai/grok-4', // defaults to Vercel AI Gateway prompt: 'How does Vercel AI Gateway have no markup on tokens?' }) ``` *AI Gateway supports hundreds of models, you can [view the library here](https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models).* With AI Gateway you can use any vendor, any model, through a single API. Built on AI SDK 5, it supports hundreds of models today without requiring you to manage API keys, rate limits, or provider accounts. The Gateway handles authentication, usage tracking, failover, billing, and more. Developers want speed, reliability, and choice. AI Gateway is built for teams creating AI apps, agents, RAG systems, or search and chat experiences who: - Evaluate or swap models dynamically - Need higher rate limits than a single vendor can provide - Want access to new frontier models as soon as they launch - Can’t afford a single point of failure - Need visibility into model usage and cost without juggling several dashboards ## Zero markup, high reliability And all this with zero markup: bring your own keys and contracts, with no added markup on model prices. Just as CDNs transformed networking with redundancy, failover, and optimization, AI Gateway will transform inference reliability for your apps. Vercel's CDN powers trillions of requests a year[^footnote], and sits at the core of AI Gateway providing sub-20ms latency. ## Getting started with AI Gateway The AI Gateway is now [generally available](https://vercel.com/changelog/ai-gateway-is-now-generally-available). [Try it for free](https://vercel.com/d?to=%2F%5Bteam%5D%2F%7E%2Fai%2Fapi-keys%3Futm_source%3Dai_gateway_landing_page&title=Get+an+API+Key), or [browse the model library](https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models) to see supported providers and chat with a model of your choice. Through the AI Gateway, we want to help you build fast, stay reliable, and keep up with the rapid pace of AI innovation without being slowed down by infrastructure, or locked into any one model or provider. ## Frequently Asked Questions **Can I try the AI Gateway for free?** Yes! When you sign up for a Vercel account, you get $5 of credits every 30 days to try out any model from our model list. We don’t restrict access to premium models. Note: After you make your first payment, you are considered a paid customer and will no longer receive the free credits. **How is the AI Gateway priced?** We offer tokens at list price from the upstream providers with no markup. If you bring your own key, we will not add any markup to your token price (0%). You are responsible for any payment processing fees. **Do you have any rate limits?** While the upstream providers may have limits, Vercel doesn’t place any rate limits on your queries. We are constantly working with the upstream providers to get you the maximum limits, throughput and reliability. **What models do you support?** We have over a hundred models from a range of providers to give you the maximum flexibility. See the full model list [here](https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models). --- **More posts:** [View all blog posts](https://vercel.com/blog/sitemap.md) | [Changelog](https://vercel.com/changelog/sitemap.md)