As recorded at collection: Vercel AI Gateway: $5 in free monthly usage

Vercel AI Gateway brings together AI models from companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Zhipu (智谱), MiniMax, and StepFun. Instead of signing up with each company separately, you can call every listed model with a single API key (an authentication string required to use the service). If a model from one company stops working due to an outage, the service automatically switches to a model from another company, so you do not need to build your own retry handling.

Scroll down the left-hand menu in the Vercel dashboard, select AI Gateway, and register a credit card to start using it right away. Sort the model list by Free Tier to see only the models available for free. The current free list includes anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5, minimax/minimax-m3, zai/glm-5.2, openai/gpt-5.4-mini, stepfun/step-3.7-flash, openai/gpt-oss-120b, and openai/text-embedding-3-small.

The free allowance resets every 30 days, and once it is used up, you have to wait until the next cycle. The author says these models cost a few dozen cents to a few dollars per million tokens, so $5 is enough to use them all month for testing, small tools, or a personal chat bot, with some allowance left over. Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5.4 Mini are sufficient for everyday conversations and code generation. GLM-5.2, released in June, is strong at Chinese-language processing, and gpt-oss-120b is an open model with 120 billion parameters. The free allowance only covers calls to some models, and its rate limits are lower than those of paid plans. The author also cautions that free offers requiring card registration carry risks and should be approached carefully.