Vercel AI Gateway free tier: $5 of credits, real limits

Posted on Oct 23 • Originally published at agentjournal.dev

"Free tier" on a gateway usually means one of two things: a meter you discover after the bill, or a teaser that evaporates the moment you enter a card. The Vercel AI Gateway free tier is neither — it is $5 of credits per 30 days, real and observed, with no card required. The catch is that the free credits stop once a card is registered. I use it for the projects already on Vercel's stack, and it works fine as long as I respect that one rule and keep the gateway off the default path.

Every 30 days, the account gets $5 in gateway credits. For a low-volume path — a dashboard endpoint, a small agent script attached to a Vercel deployment — that covers the month without drama. The key word is low-volume. I treat the credit balance as the spec: if a project's gateway traffic fits inside $5 of credits a month, it can live on the free tier. If it cannot, it belongs on the paid gateway, not here. There is no billing surprise, because there is no card attached.

The behavior I observed: the free tier ends once a card is registered. Not "the credits keep coming and the card catches the overflow" — the free credits simply stop. That is the single most important detail, because every signup flow nudges you toward adding a card for overage protection. On this gateway, that safety net cancels the free tier. I keep the free-tier projects card-free, and the moment a project needs overage protection, it graduates to the paid gateway instead of adding the card.

The gateway key goes straight into my password manager — never into the repository, never into agent context. Agents that need it fetch it from the credential broker at runtime, so a checked-in file or a pasted env var is not how the key travels. That is the same discipline I described in my post on credential management for AI agents, and it matters more with gateways than with direct providers, because one gateway key opens every model behind it.

Rate limits are the routine failure mode, and the handling is configured, not improvised. When the gateway returns HTTP 429, the fallback chain routes the call to a different model provider and the work continues. The gateway is not my default gateway; it is used only for projects already on the Vercel stack, and only for the low-volume path within those projects. A 429 on that path is an inconvenience handled in the chain, not a stop-the-world event. That is why I keep the free tier on the chain instead of in it as the only option.

Workflow preference: the projects on Vercel's stack get the gateway because it sits next to the deployment, not because it is the best router I have. Everything else routes through my main gateway, with its own cost tracking and fallback chain. Keeping the Vercel gateway scoped to its own projects means the $5 credit tier never has to carry more than it is sized for, and the card-on-file rule never gets tested by accident.

The $5 credit tier is honest about what it is — a small monthly allowance with a sharp edge. Respect the edge, and it quietly covers a whole class of low-volume work. Have you checked whether your gateway's "free tier" actually survives adding a card?

Disclosure: some links in this post are affiliate links — see disclosure.

Originally published at agentjournal.dev.