Kong AI Gateway vs Vercel AI Gateway: LLM Gateways Comparison

Kong AI Gateway extends Kong API Gateway with AI-specific routing and observability. The platform provides comprehensive features for production AI applications with focus on reliability and developer experience.

Vercel AI Gateway is a production-ready LLM gateway that provides unified access to hundreds of AI models with built-in reliability, monitoring, and cost management. Available to every Vercel team account, the gateway offers a free USD 5 monthly credit plus pay-as-you-go pricing with zero markup on model tokens. When bringing your own API keys, Vercel charges no platform fees, offering tokens at provider list price. Vercel Agent is priced at USD 0.30 per action plus underlying token costs. The platform focuses on developer experience, enabling frontend developers to add LLM capabilities with minimal setup without managing provider-specific SDKs or credentials. Key features include unified API across providers, budget controls, usage monitoring, load balancing, and automatic failover. While praised for ease of use, transparent pricing, and reliability with automatic failover, Vercel AI Gateway faces criticism for infrastructure limitations including 504 Gateway Timeout errors for long-running agents, execution time constraints (15 seconds default, 300 seconds maximum on Pro), insufficient semantic caching relying only on HTTP headers, and vendor lock-in with custom middleware not easily portable to other platforms.