Cloudflare AI Gateway vs Vercel AI Gateway
Both are llm gateways tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
Cloudflare AI Gateway
Core gateway features free on every Cloudflare plan, running at the edge rather than in one region. Its 2026 unified billing lets you pay OpenAI, Anthropic and Google through a single Cloudflare invoice.
Vercel AI Gateway
No markup on tokens and $5 of free credits a month per team. The details worth knowing are that BYOK is paid-tier only, and zero data retention is a metered add-on at $0.10 per 1,000 requests.
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | Vercel AI Gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Our rating | 4/5 | 4/5 |
| Starting price | $0 | $0 plus provider list price |
| Billing meter | record | No usage metering |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | No or paid tier only | No or paid tier only |
| Best for | Teams already on Cloudflare who want caching, rate limiting and cost visibility at the edge with no markup, and who have separate tooling for evaluation. | Teams already deploying on Vercel who want provider-agnostic model access at list price with no markup, and who do not need governance features that carry a per-request charge. |
Our verdict on Cloudflare AI Gateway
Cloudflare AI Gateway is the best free managed gateway available, and the reason is that Cloudflare is not trying to make money from it directly. Core features - dashboard analytics, caching, rate limiting - are free on every plan, there is no percentage markup on your tokens, and the free tier includes 100,000 logs a month with the $5 Workers Paid plan lifting that to a million. Compare OpenRouter charging 5.5% of everything you spend forever, and the difference at volume is substantial. Running at the edge is a genuine architectural advantage too, putting the control plane near your users rather than in one region. The 2026 addition of unified billing, letting you pay for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google AI Studio usage through a single Cloudflare invoice, removes procurement friction that is more annoying in practice than it sounds. Two honest limits. The metering is logs, not requests, so that is the number to model. And observability stops at request metrics and cost - there is no structured evaluation, so this is one component of a stack rather than the stack.
Full Cloudflare AI Gateway review →Our verdict on Vercel AI Gateway
Vercel AI Gateway takes no markup on tokens, which puts it in the right half of this category immediately. You pay provider list price from prepaid credits, every team gets $5 a month in credits that refresh every 30 days, and platform seats are free on Hobby - so a solo developer pays nothing for the gateway itself. Against OpenRouter's 5.5% with no volume discounts, that difference compounds indefinitely. Three details deserve attention before you commit. BYOK is paid-tier only, so using your own provider keys requires the $20 per seat plan. Failed BYOK requests fall back to system credentials and are charged against your balance, which is the kind of thing you discover on an invoice rather than in documentation. And zero data retention is not a default - it is a team-wide add-on metered at $0.10 per 1,000 successful requests, with provider allowlists priced the same way. Charging per request for privacy and for basic governance is an unusual choice and worth modelling if either matters to you.
Full Vercel AI Gateway review →Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between Cloudflare AI Gateway and Vercel AI Gateway?
Cloudflare AI Gateway: Teams already on Cloudflare who want caching, rate limiting and cost visibility at the edge with no markup, and who have separate tooling for evaluation. Vercel AI Gateway: Teams already deploying on Vercel who want provider-agnostic model access at list price with no markup, and who do not need governance features that carry a per-request charge. Both sit in LLM Gateways, so the decision usually comes down to billing model and deployment rather than raw capability.
Which is cheaper, Cloudflare AI Gateway or Vercel AI Gateway?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - Cloudflare AI Gateway bills on record and Vercel AI Gateway bills on no usage metering. Published starting prices are $0 and $0 plus provider list price respectively, but those numbers are not comparable until you apply them to the same traffic. Use our cost calculator to model both against your own request volume and span count.
Can I self-host Cloudflare AI Gateway or Vercel AI Gateway?
Cloudflare AI Gateway: No or paid tier only. Vercel AI Gateway: No or paid tier only. Free self-hosting means no licence fee, not no cost - you still own the infrastructure, upgrades and on-call.