Vercel AI Gateway vs OpenRouter (2026): Which to Choose

How OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway differ

OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway are both hosted LLM gateways that give you one API key for models across many providers, without any infrastructure to run. Where they differ is how each one charges for that access and what you get beyond routing.

OpenRouter offers 500+ models from 80+ providers through one OpenAI-compatible API. You buy credits, and each request draws on that balance at the provider's list rate. For prototyping, it also has 25+ free models limited to 50 requests a day. It's worth nothing that OpenRouter is also going through an ownership change, since Stripe agreed to acquire it in August 2026.

Vercel AI Gateway is Vercel's managed gateway, and despite the name, your app doesn't need to run on Vercel. You can call it from any server through the AI SDK, the OpenAI Chat Completions or Responses APIs, or Anthropic's Messages API. It logs the latency, token usage, and cost of each request, supports ordered provider and model fallbacks, and lets you set budgets by team, project, API key, or team member. Teams already on the AI SDK get the shortest setup, because the SDK can route a call through the gateway with just a model string.

OpenRouter vs Vercel AI Gateway pricing

Both gateways bill tokens at the provider's list rate, so the per-token price of a model is usually the same on either one. What differs is the fees around it.

OpenRouter's pricing adds a platform fee when you buy credits, at 5.5% on the Standard plan and 8% on Business, with discounts negotiated on Enterprise. Bringing your own provider keys is free up to $25,000 of inference a month, with a 5% fee after that, so high-volume BYOK teams can still end up paying one.

Vercel AI Gateway's pricing has no markup and no platform fee, including when you bring your own keys, although you cover payment processing fees unless you're on Enterprise and pay by invoice. BYOK requires purchased credits, and some features cost extra once you enable them, including custom reporting, team-wide zero data retention, and OpenTelemetry trace drains to your own observability tool. The free tier is a monthly credit on a subset of models, with lower rate limits than the paid tier.

Respan: routing with observability and evals built in

OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway both put many providers behind one API and show you what each request cost. Respan is the AI router with built-in observability and automated evals, giving you one OpenAI-compatible endpoint for 1,000+ models with every request traced on the same platform that runs your evals.

Each call is recorded with its cost, latency, and token usage, and that production traffic feeds the evals that catch quality regressions before users do. Fallback chains and spend controls are configured in the same place, so when a provider fails or a budget spikes, the traces that explain it are right there. For security reviews, Respan is SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, offers HIPAA with a BAA, and supports PII masking.

If you want to route, observe, and evaluate every LLM call in one place, Respan covers all of it, starting on the free tier. OpenRouter fits teams that want a large catalog behind one credit balance, while Vercel AI Gateway fits teams that want list-price tokens with no platform fee, especially if they already build on the AI SDK.