Vercel AI Gateway's free tier offers $5 monthly credits, but ends once a card is added
Vercel's AI Gateway provides $5 in credits every 30 days with no card required, which the author finds sufficient for low-volume projects already on Vercel. The author warns that registering a payment card causes the free credits to stop entirely rather than acting as overage protection. Because the gateway key grants access to every model behind it, the author stores it in a password manager and fetches it at runtime rather than committing it to code. Rate-limit errors (HTTP 429) are handled by a fallback chain that routes requests to other model providers. The author uses the gateway only for Vercel-hosted projects and keeps the free tier card-free, moving projects needing overage protection to a paid gateway instead.
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