LiteLLM vs Vercel AI Gateway
Both are llm gateways tools. Here is how they actually differ on price, billing model and deployment.
LiteLLM
The most widely adopted open-source LLM gateway, MIT licensed with 100+ provider integrations and zero markup on your tokens. The catch is that you operate it, and published enterprise pricing is wildly inconsistent.
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.
| LiteLLM | Vercel AI Gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | LLM Gateways | LLM Gateways |
| Our rating | 5/5 | 4/5 |
| Starting price | $0 self-hosted | $0 plus provider list price |
| Billing meter | No usage metering | No usage metering |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free self-hosting | Yes, free | No or paid tier only |
| Best for | Teams with engineering capacity that want provider-agnostic routing with no per-token markup, particularly at volumes where a percentage fee on a managed gateway becomes significant. | 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 LiteLLM
LiteLLM is the default open-source LLM gateway and deserves to be. It is MIT licensed, fronts 100+ providers behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and takes no markup on your tokens - which is the decisive difference at any real volume, because managed alternatives charge a percentage of everything you spend forever. Adopting it is largely a base URL change, and so is leaving, which is an unusually honest position for infrastructure to be in. The cost is operational rather than financial. You run the proxy, the database, the monitoring and the upgrades, which realistically means a few hundred dollars a month of infrastructure and a person who owns it. Releases are frequent enough that pinning to stable versions is advisable. The one genuinely unsatisfying part is enterprise pricing, where third-party sources disagree so wildly - from $250 a month to around $30,000 a year - that none of them can be trusted, and enterprise SSO being free only up to five users means identity management turns into a commercial conversation sooner than you might expect.
Full LiteLLM 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 LiteLLM and Vercel AI Gateway?
LiteLLM: Teams with engineering capacity that want provider-agnostic routing with no per-token markup, particularly at volumes where a percentage fee on a managed gateway becomes significant. 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, LiteLLM or Vercel AI Gateway?
It depends entirely on your workload shape, because they meter differently - LiteLLM bills on no usage metering and Vercel AI Gateway bills on no usage metering. Published starting prices are $0 self-hosted 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 LiteLLM or Vercel AI Gateway?
LiteLLM: Yes, free. 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.