Vercel AI Gateway alternative
A Vercel AI Gateway Alternative with a Person Behind It
Vercel AI Gateway passes tokens through at the provider’s list price with no markup, and charges no fee when you bring your own key (October 2026). That is generous. What it leaves to you is choosing the budgets, reading the logs, and turning them into something the business can act on.
With Cascadia you get
- Your providers bill you directly
- No credits to top up
- Every request logged
- Spend caps agreed with you
- Fallback when a provider fails
- A monthly report, included
Cascadia vs Vercel AI Gateway at a Glance
Three Questions That Decide It
Are Your Applications Deployed on Vercel?
Who Sets and Reviews the Budgets?
How Do You Want Spend Reported?
Side by Side
| Vercel AI Gateway | Cascadia | |
|---|---|---|
| Token pricing | Provider list price, no markup | Your providers bill you directly |
| Your own keys | No fee, on the paid tier | Your keys, always |
| Billing | –Prepaid credits, card fees yours | $79 a month, flat |
| Budgets | By team, project, key, or member | Per application, agreed with you |
| Custom reporting | –$0.075 per 1,000 writes, $5 per 1,000 queries | Monthly report included |
| Traces to your tools | Trace Drains, metered | –90 days of logs in your portal |
| Who watches it | ×Your team | We do, every month |
Token Pricing
Your Own Keys
Billing
Budgets
Custom Reporting
Traces to Your Tools
Who Watches It
What Ships in the Standard Plan Here
Vercel gives you zero-markup tokens, budgets at several levels, and optional add-ons for reporting, provider allowlists, zero data retention, and trace drains, each metered separately. Setting the budgets and reading what comes back is your team’s job.
- Your provider accounts keep billing you directly
- No prepaid credit balance to watch or top up
- Every request logged with the prompt, reply, model, and cost
- The application behind each call named
- Spend caps agreed per application, then enforced
- A warning before a budget is reached
- Fallback and retries when a provider goes down
- A monthly report by application, with no per-query charge
- Ninety days of searchable history
- One price of $79 a month per organization
Where Cascadia Goes Further
Vercel prices the tokens fairly and the extras by use. We include the watching and the reporting in one price.
Reporting Without per-Query Charges
Vercel’s Custom Reporting costs $0.075 per 1,000 tag writes and $5 per 1,000 queries (October 2026). Our monthly report by application is part of the $79.
No Credit Balance to Manage
Vercel bills tokens from prepaid AI Gateway Credits, with auto top-up optional and payment processing fees yours. Here your providers bill you directly, on accounts you already hold.
Budgets Somebody Sat Down and Chose
Vercel lets you cap spend by team, project, key, or member. We decide the numbers with you and tell you before one is reached.
Not Tied to a Hosting Account
Vercel AI Gateway lives inside a Vercel team account. If your applications run somewhere else, ours sits in front of them without adding a platform account.
Who This Comparison Is For
Teams Already Deploying on Vercel
If your applications are on Vercel, its gateway is a short step away, and zero markup on tokens is hard to argue with.
Engineers Who Want Traces in Their Own Tools
Trace Drains forward an OpenTelemetry trace of each request to your observability tool, at $0.05 per 1,000 traces plus $0.50 per GB on Pro and Enterprise (October 2026).
Businesses Who Want the Month Explained
A dashboard answers questions you think to ask. A written report tells you the ones you did not think of, like which application doubled its spend.
Choose Vercel AI Gateway if
- Your applications already deploy on Vercel
- You want zero-markup tokens and nothing else
- Developers will set and review the budgets
Choose Cascadia if
- You want caps set by someone watching
- You would rather not manage a credit balance
- You want spend explained each month
Moving from Vercel AI Gateway in Four Steps
Your applications already call a gateway, so the move is an endpoint change plus making sure each provider account is in your name.
- 1
We Review Your Budgets and Usage
Which models and providers your applications call, which budgets are set, and what a typical month costs on your credit balance.
- 2
Provider Accounts Are Confirmed
Each provider you rely on needs an account in your name, if it is not already there, so the keys and the bills are yours.
- 3
Caps and Fallbacks Are Agreed with You
Spend caps, rate limits, and fallback order are settled on a call before any traffic moves.
- 4
Applications Switch and Reports Begin
Each application points at our endpoint in turn. The first full picture arrives within a week, then a written report every month.
What Clients Say About Working with Cascadia
“I’ve always dreaded website management, but Cascadia has done an incredible job with my WordPress site, making it one less thing for me to worry about.”
“I’ve worked with Cascadia for several years now. They are always ready to help in any way I ask and can implement my ideas with ease. A company that values their clients!”
“Cascadia has been great to work with! We recently needed some updates, and Cascadia was quick to get them completed! We highly recommend Cascadia Web Services.”
“Cascadia is very responsive and we’re happy with them as our primary IT vendor.”
“They do great work, been using for years. Prompt responses to requests.”
Ready to Move from Vercel AI Gateway?
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Vercel AI Gateway Alternative Questions
Straight answers about pricing, credits, and what changes when you switch.
See AI GatewayStill have a question?
What is a Vercel AI Gateway alternative?
Any other gateway between your applications and their AI providers. That includes OpenRouter, Portkey, and LiteLLM, and managed services like ours where someone sets the gateway up and watches it for you.
How is Cascadia different from Vercel AI Gateway?
Vercel offers a developer gateway with zero-markup tokens, budgets, and metered add-ons, which your team configures. We run a gateway for you at $79 a month per organization, with caps set alongside you and a written report each month.
Is Vercel cheaper?
On the gateway itself, often. There is no markup on tokens and no fee for bringing your own key (October 2026). The costs show up in the add-ons you switch on and in the time somebody spends reading the data. If nobody needs to read it, Vercel is the cheaper route.
What happens if my own key fails on Vercel?
Vercel’s documentation says a failed request using your credentials is retried with its system credentials, and that fallback usage is charged to your credit balance. It is a reasonable reliability choice, and worth knowing when you read the bill.
Do we need to be hosted on Vercel to use it?
Vercel AI Gateway is part of a Vercel team account. Our gateway needs no hosting account at all, just a change to the endpoint your applications call.
Do my applications need code changes?
Only the endpoint, plus your own provider keys in place of the Vercel key if you were buying credits. You can point back at any time.
Where does my data go?
Prompts and responses pass through the infrastructure the gateway runs on. We walk you through what that means before anything is switched on. Vercel offers team-wide zero data retention at $0.10 per 1,000 requests if that is a requirement.
How long are logs kept?
Ninety days, with the prompt, reply, model, cost, and the application that made the call.
How quickly does setup start?
Within two business days, with the first full picture inside a week.
Ready to hand the gateway over?
$79 a month per organization, your providers billing you directly, 90 days of logs, and a person here setting the caps and writing the monthly report.