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Vercel AI Gateway — free tier setup
What you get free
A monthly free credit on Vercel's model aggregator, conditional on having a Vercel team account. Per the catalog: "cheahjs: 'Limits: $5/month'. Vercel pricing docs: 'The free tier includes a subset of models, not the full catalog. ... Free tier requests are also rate limited per model, with lower limits than the paid tier. ... Your free credits start when you make your first AI Gateway request. ... Once you purchase credits, your account transitions to the paid tier and the monthly free credit no longer applies.'" Note: Vercel's own pages confirm a monthly free credit but never state the $5 figure — that comes from the cheahjs seed repo. The gotcha: buying credits once permanently ends the monthly free credit.
Friction check
| Credit card | no (for the free tier) |
| Phone verification | unknown |
| Org/membership | Vercel team account required |
| Est. time to first key | ~5m if you already have a Vercel account |
| Trains on your prompts | unknown — depends on upstream providers; a "Disallow prompt training" control and ZDR routing exist |
The rest of this guide — the key-obtain walkthrough, first request, the limits that will bite you, and the rotation runbook — ships with the Indie field library. What you’ve read above is the real first section, not a blurred preview; the remainder simply isn’t in this page.