Prepaid multi-model wallet
Vercel AI Gateway is a hosted wallet inside Vercel: provider list prices with no platform fee or token markup on the paid tier, BYOK at 0% once you buy credits, and a free tier with $5/month on a subset of models. Processor fees may apply when you purchase credits; enterprise invoice has none. RouterPlex is a standalone prepaid wallet — no Vercel account, $0 to fund 40 models, requests stop at $0. Pick Vercel if you already live in the AI SDK. Pick us if you want a stop-at-zero key that is not tied to Vercel.
Wallet
Category
$0
Top-up fee
40
Models
At a glance
Figures are taken from official vendor pages and dated 26 Aug 2026. Verify before you move production traffic.
| RouterPlex | Vercel AI Gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| Token markup / platform fee | Vendor list, $0 markup | None on tokens (official) |
| Fee to fund credits | $0.00 on card and crypto | Processor fees may apply; invoice has none |
| Free tier | No — $5 minimum top-up | $5/month on a subset of models (official) |
| BYOK | Not offered | Paid tier — 0% (official); fallback billed to credits |
| Balance can go negative | Never — requests stop at $0 | Credits deducted; not a stop-at-zero wallet |
| Hard per-key budgets | Hard lifetime cap on every key | Dashboard spend controls and auto top-up |
| Vercel / AI SDK fit | Works from any OpenAI client | The reason to buy Vercel |
| Model catalog | 40 curated models, 14 providers | Vercel catalog; free tier is a subset |
| Bonus-credit plans | Optional, up to +25% ($125 for $100) | Not a +25% credit plan |
Vercel figures from vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/pricing, checked 26 Aug 2026. We do not invent a card-processor percentage; their page says you are responsible for any payment processing fees that may apply. Enterprise invoice has none.
01 — Honesty
vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/pricing (26 Aug 2026): no markup and no platform fee on tokens. You pay the provider's list price from purchased AI Gateway credits. BYOK on the paid tier has no markup or fee from AI Gateway. Enterprise teams can pay by invoice with no payment processing fees.
The same page says you are responsible for any payment processing fees that may apply when buying credits. That is not a published 2.9% (or any other) Vercel rate, so we do not cite one. RouterPlex's published top-up fee is $0 on card and crypto.
02 — Product shape
The strongest reason to choose Vercel AI Gateway is already being on Vercel: AI SDK, deployments, and one dashboard. The base URL is https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1. Free tier is $5/month on Free Tier-eligible models; buying credits moves you to paid and the monthly free credit stops.
RouterPlex does not require a Vercel team. You fund $5 or more, we add the full amount, and requests cease at $0. That is worse for a zero-cost experiment on Vercel's free-tier subset and better for a leaked-key ceiling on a key you can hand to Claude Code or Cursor without the rest of the Vercel stack.
03 — BYOK and fallback
Vercel BYOK is paid-tier only. If your provider key fails, AI Gateway retries with system credentials and bills that fallback against your credits. You need purchased credits to use BYOK. RouterPlex has no BYOK path — we are the merchant for the catalog.
If you must keep an existing OpenAI or Anthropic contract, Vercel (or LLM Gateway, or Requesty) is the closer product. Choose RouterPlex when you want to avoid those contracts.
04 — Fit
Keep Vercel AI Gateway when the application already runs there and the AI SDK is how you call models. Add RouterPlex when you need a prepaid, stop-at-zero key that is not tied to a Vercel team — coding agents, crypto top-ups, or a hard per-key budget for a workload that should not auto-top-up.
The verdict
These are different products. Choose the job you actually need, not the logo that showed up first in a search.
Switching
Both are OpenAI-compatible. Vercel's base URL is https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1. After the swap, use RouterPlex model ids from the catalog — not Vercel model slugs.
# before client = OpenAI(base_url="https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1", api_key=VERCEL_AI_GATEWAY_KEY) # after client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.routerplex.com/v1", api_key=ROUTERPLEX_API_KEY)
Full setup guides for Claude Code, Cursor and other tools are in the documentation.
Questions
Yes if the job is a hosted multi-model wallet. Vercel is the better fit inside the Vercel/AI SDK workflow, with no published token markup and a $5/month free tier on a subset of models. RouterPlex is the better fit as a standalone prepaid key that cannot go negative.
Not on tokens. vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/pricing (26 Aug 2026) says no markup and no platform fee; you pay provider list prices from credits. You are responsible for any payment processing fees that may apply. Enterprise invoice has none. We do not invent a processor percentage.
On the paid tier, AI Gateway adds no markup or fee on BYOK. Free tier cannot BYOK. If your key fails, Vercel retries with system credentials and bills that fallback to your credits. You need purchased credits to use BYOK.
Point the OpenAI SDK at https://api.routerplex.com/v1, use a RouterPlex key, and remap model ids from the catalog. Keep Vercel for the AI SDK path if that is still the application runtime.
Also compare
Same vendor list prices. $0 top-up versus 5.5% by card. Balance never goes negative.
Closest wallet peer after OpenRouter. They charge 5% on credits and offer BYOK. We charge $0 and stop at zero.
Fireworks runs the GPUs. RouterPlex is a prepaid multi-vendor wallet — not a faster Fireworks.
Together is an AI cloud. RouterPlex is a prepaid wallet for official vendors — not a Together clone.
Start routing
Vendor list prices, $0 top-up fee, stop-at-zero balance. Top up from $5.