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TopxAI vs Vercel AI Gateway: list price with no markup, or half of it

2026-10-06

Vercel AI Gateway charges the provider list price with no markup; TopxAI shared routes charge 50% of it for Claude, GPT and Grok. What else differs.

Both services put several providers' models behind one key and one balance, and both work with the Vercel AI SDK. They price tokens differently. Vercel AI Gateway charges the provider's list price with no markup. TopxAI's shared routes charge half of that list price for Claude, GPT and Grok. This page states what each side publishes. Vercel's figures come from its pricing page and its public model API, both read on October 6, 2026, and may change.

Side by side

	TopxAI	Vercel AI Gateway
Models	14, seven lines: Claude, GPT, Grok, GLM (private deployment), Kimi, DeepSeek, Jev	About 400 entries in its model API, from most providers, including embeddings, reranking and speech
Token price	Claude, GPT and Grok shared routes at 50% of the provider list price, their official routes at 90%; Kimi 80%; DeepSeek 80% with off-peak and peak hours; Jev 107%	The provider's list price with no markup and no platform fee; some models discounted for everyone; volume discounts by agreement
Free start	$0.50 credit at sign-up	$5 of credit a month on a free tier that covers a subset of models at lower rate limits; it stops once you buy credits
Your own provider keys	Not supported	Supported on the paid tier with no markup; a failed request is retried with Vercel's credentials and charged to your credits
Fees	None on top-up: the amount credited is the amount you enter (regional tax may be added at checkout)	Payment processing fees may apply; optional paid add-ons such as Custom Reporting and a team-wide provider allowlist
API formats	OpenAI Chat Completions and Responses, Anthropic Messages, images, video, `/v1/systemone`	AI SDK provider, OpenAI Chat Completions and Responses, Anthropic Messages, OpenResponses, a REST API
Routing	Auto route picks the lowest-priced of TopxAI's own routes for the model; per-route keys pin a line	Provider ordering and filtering, model fallbacks, budgets per team, project, key or member
Prompts and completions	Relayed in memory, never stored	Optional Zero Data Retention routing to providers that have agreed not to retain or train on prompt data

Current price examples

Checked on October 6, 2026 against the TopxAI price API and the Vercel AI Gateway model API. Prices are USD per million tokens, shown as input / output, for standard requests below any long-context threshold. They exclude cache tokens, fees and taxes.

Model	TopxAI route	TopxAI input / output	Vercel AI Gateway input / output	Comparison
Claude Sonnet 5.5	Shared	$1 / $5	$2 / $10	TopxAI 50% lower
Claude Opus 5.5	Shared	$2 / $10	$4 / $20	TopxAI 50% lower
Claude Fable 5.1	Shared	$5 / $25	$10 / $50	TopxAI 50% lower
GPT-6.1 Sol	Shared	$1 / $5	$2 / $10	TopxAI 50% lower
GPT-6 Astra	Shared	$5 / $25	$10 / $50	TopxAI 50% lower
Grok 4.7	Shared	$1 / $3	$2 / $6	TopxAI 50% lower
Kimi K3	Official	$2.40 / $12	$3 / $15	TopxAI 20% lower
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash	Official	$0.12 / $0.48 off-peak, $0.24 / $0.96 peak	$0.30 / $1.20	TopxAI 60% lower off-peak, 20% lower peak
DeepSeek V4 Pro	Official	$0.528 / $1.584 off-peak, $1.056 / $3.168 peak	$0.66 / $1.98	TopxAI 20% lower off-peak, 60% higher peak
Jev	Official	$0.04494 input	$0.042 input	TopxAI 7% higher

Cache prices follow the same ratio on the shared routes. For Sonnet 5.5, a cache read costs $0.10 per million tokens on TopxAI and $0.20 on Vercel, and a 5-minute cache write $1.25 against $2.50. Long-context rates keep the ratio too: Grok 4.7 requests from 200K input tokens cost $2 / $6 on TopxAI's shared route and $4 / $12 on Vercel.

DeepSeek is where the comparison turns. TopxAI follows DeepSeek's own off-peak and peak hours and bills each at 80% of DeepSeek's price for that period. Vercel's model API lists one rate per model. During DeepSeek's peak hours, V4 Pro costs more on TopxAI than Vercel's listed rate. Every TopxAI usage-log row names the period it was billed at, see how requests are billed.

The official routes sell at 90% of the provider list price, so they are 10% below Vercel's rate for the Claude, GPT and Grok models above. GLM-5.3-Abliterated is a different private fine-tune and has no Vercel counterpart; Vercel lists Z.ai's GLM-5.3 at $1.40 / $4.40. These savings apply to the routes and prices listed above, not to every TopxAI model or route. Auto routing can select a different-priced route; the billed route is in the usage log. These are public price comparisons, not a performance or reliability benchmark. Recheck both price lists before buying.

Where TopxAI is the better fit

Most of your tokens go to Claude, GPT or Grok: the shared pool costs half the list price Vercel charges. claude-sonnet-5-5 is $1 input / $5 output per million tokens (model page).
You want a fixed, published price per route and a log row per request that shows which route it took and what it cost.
You want nothing stored: no prompt, no completion, no file.

Where Vercel AI Gateway is the better fit

You need a model TopxAI does not sell, or embeddings, reranking or speech.
You want to use your own provider keys or credits you already hold with a provider.
You deploy on Vercel and want spend budgets, fallbacks and observability in the same dashboard.
You run DeepSeek V4 Pro during DeepSeek's peak hours, or you call Jev in volume.
You want to try models on a free monthly credit before paying.

Using both

Both work with the AI SDK through @ai-sdk/openai-compatible. Vercel's base URL is https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1 and TopxAI's is https://ai.topxea.com/v1 (setup). Model ids differ: Vercel uses provider/model, such as anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5, and TopxAI uses the bare id, such as claude-sonnet-5-5. Two provider objects in one application let each request go where it costs least.

Models: claude-sonnet-5-5, gpt-6.1-sol, grok-4.7 · Models & pricing

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