RouterPlus vs Vercel AI Gateway

RouterPlus

The docs are written for agents, every model price is public, and each response carries its own cost. No terms of service, privacy policy, status page or changelog were found. Signup adds no free credit, and the chat catalogue is Claude and GPT only.

Vercel AI Gateway

Token prices pass through with no markup, prompts are not stored by the gateway, and budgets, provider failover and per-request logs are built in. The free monthly credit needs a card on file, rate limits are not published as numbers, no SLA covers the API, and the contractual promise not to train on content applies to Enterprise subscriptions only.

RouterPlus

1. Send max_tokens on every request. Without it the balance hold assumes up to 32,768 output tokens and can return insufficient_quota on a small balance
2. Switch on error_type. Retry rate_limit after retry-after, and stop on insufficient_quota, which needs a person to add credit or raise a cap
3. Don't add a retry loop on top of the SDK's. There is no idempotency key, so a retry that reaches a provider is billed again
4. Copy model ids from GET /v1/models or /api/models.json. An unknown id is a 404 and the gateway never substitutes one
5. Use /v1/messages for Claude when you need thinking or server tools, and /v1/chat/completions with response_format only for GPT ids

Vercel AI Gateway

1. Read GET https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/models without a key to pick a model ID and check its price, context, ZDR and no-training flags before calling
2. Set zeroDataRetention or disallowPromptTraining to true in providerOptions.gateway on sensitive requests. Default routing ignores provider retention and training policies
3. Treat a 429 as retryable and honour retry-after when present. A 402 with quota_for_entity_exceeded is a spent budget, so do not retry it
4. On a Token Pass key, a 403 with no_providers_available means spent credit or a model outside the pass. Retry with a standard AI Gateway key, which bills credits
5. Set inferenceRegion when data residency matters. The default global may run inference outside the user's jurisdiction