Hugging Face Inference Providers vs Vercel AI Gateway

Hugging Face Inference Providers 25

Hosted lines. status.huggingface.co is a Better Stack page with 90-day component history for the Hub, Inference Endpoints, Spaces, the CDNs and Jobs, but no component for Inference Providers or the router (10 of 20). With no component, there is no readable incident history for the surface agents call, and the feed's 23 items from 10 June to 7 October 2026 don't name it (5). No rate limits for the router were found; the Hub rate-limits page gives numbers for Hub APIs, resolvers and pages only (0). No 429 or overload guidance for the router was found (0). No SLA found (0). Chat completions on the router is generally available; the Responses API is labelled beta (10). Routing between providers with :fastest or :cheapest softens a single provider's outage, which this checklist doesn't score.

Vercel AI Gateway 79

Hosted reading. AI Gateway is a component on www.vercel-status.com (20). The history feed, re-read on 1 November 2026, has 25 entries from 23 July to 23 October, so it covers the whole 90 days from 3 August. None names AI Gateway in its title or text. The Drains, Logs and Observability incidents (6, 17 and 20 August, 16 to 17 September, 10 October in Washington, which names delayed logs, metrics and traces in general, and 23 October) name no AI Gateway surface, and none reports requests failing. Component tags sit in the status API, which robots.txt disallows, so they were not used. A readable page that posts incidents, none touching the product, is a clean record, as vercel-connect's incidents were read from the same feed (30). The rate-limit page, re-read on 1 November, says it describes behaviour rather than fixed numbers. The paid tier has no gateway limit, and the free tier's per-model limits are not published (5 of 15). A 429 has a documented JSON body, some carry retry-after, the docs give backoff code and separate a 429 from a 402 budget rejection, and failed provider attempts are retried on other providers (14 of 15). The Enterprise SLA excludes the APIs and CLI, and no SLA naming AI Gateway was found (0). Generally available since 21 August 2025. Token Pass is early access and the Python SDK is in beta (10).

Hugging Face Inference Providers 58

Router reading of the model checklist (tool use, structured output, caching, context, batch, SDKs, errors), as for openrouter. Tool calling through the OpenAI-compatible API with tool_choice, support flagged per provider in /v1/models (15 of 20). Structured output documented, support flagged per provider and false on some (10 of 15). No prompt caching guidance found, though the Enterprise usage API counts cached input tokens (3 of 15). Routes to models with up to 1,048,576 tokens of context per the model list, a judgement call since a router has no default model (15). No batch API (0 of 10). Official clients in Python and JavaScript, plus any OpenAI SDK (10). Errors not documented (5 of 15).

Vercel AI Gateway 83

Router, read on the model lines. Tool calling is documented on all six surfaces and 303 of 498 models carry the tool-use tag on 1 November, with behaviour depending on the model routed (16 of 20). Structured output is documented per surface and tagged on 278 models (13 of 15). caching: 'auto' adds Anthropic cache markers, cache_ttl asks for one-hour entries, x-session-affinity keeps a conversation on one provider, and cache-read prices are listed per model (14 of 15). 162 models list a context of one million tokens or more, a judgement call since a router has no default model (15). The SDK source has a gateway-batch.ts file, but no batch endpoint or batch discount was found in the docs (2 of 10). The AI SDK for TypeScript, the AI SDK for Python in beta, and the OpenAI and Anthropic SDKs with a changed base URL (10). Errors return message and type, an exceeded budget answers 402 apart from a 429, the SDK has ten typed Gateway*Error classes, and the FAQ maps each status to a fix (13 of 15).

Hugging Face Inference Providers 62

No OpenAPI document for the router (openapi.json paths answer 404). The task reference pages are generated from typed JSON Schema specs in huggingface.js, and the router's /v1/models gives a machine-readable catalogue, so 12 of 25. llms.txt for the Inference Providers docs and a Markdown twin of every page via .md (10). Guides say what each task and policy is for, with a quick setup page for coding agents (14 of 20). Parameter tables with types for chat completion, though response_format and tool_choice show as unknown types (9 of 15). Examples in Python, JavaScript and curl on every task page, but no documented error responses for the router (9 of 15). No changelog of its own; the Hub changelog doesn't cover it and dated changes are only in the hub-docs history (8 of 15).

Vercel AI Gateway 74

Router, scored on the API lines. Vercel's OpenAPI 3.0.3 document has AI Gateway management paths (budgets, routing rules, virtual model configs, routers) and POST /api-keys. It does not cover the inference routes on ai-gateway.vercel.sh or /v1/models, /v1/credits, /v1/generation and /v1/report, which follow the OpenAI and Anthropic formats and the REST reference page (12 of 25). Every docs page is served as Markdown, and vercel.com/llms.txt lists AI Gateway and the keyless model list (10). The docs say when to use AI Gateway, which API format suits which client, and what each control leaves out, such as BYOK spend outside budgets (16 of 20). providerOptions.gateway fields are documented in tables with types, and the model list names each model's supported parameters. The request bodies have no published schema of their own (9 of 15). cURL, TypeScript and Python examples on most pages, and error tables in the FAQ, the REST reference and the Token Pass pages. The Chat Completions error list omits 402 (13 of 15). Paths carry /v1, the changelog is dated, with 95 entries naming AI Gateway from 3 August to 30 October 2026, and @ai-sdk/gateway keeps a CHANGELOG. The changelog sitemap dates one AI Gateway entry to 25 March 2025, before the alpha (14 of 15).