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TopxAI vs Vercel AI Gateway: list price with no markup, or half of it
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.
November 12, 2026 update: Jev costs $0.055 per million input tokens, output free (it was $0.04494, 107% of TypeSafe's list price, before), and a costlier standby line answers, at $0.058, only when the main line fails.
November 10, 2026 update: since November 8 the GLM, Kimi and DeepSeek lines are all served from private deployments, at fixed prices. As of November 10, per million tokens (input / cache read / output): GLM-5.3-Abliterated $3.00 / $0.45 / $6.00, GLM-5.3-Flash-Abliterated $0.36 / $0.075 / $1.50, Kimi K3.1 Pro $0.50 / $0.30 / $5.00, deepseek-flash-Abliterated $0.42 / $0.105 / $1.50 and deepseek-flash-fast $0.02 / $0.004 / $0.16. These deployments differ from the providers' own APIs, so this page does not make a like-for-like price comparison for them, and no Vercel AI Gateway quote for these models was verified in this update. The dated competitor prices below have not been rechecked.
Side by side
| TopxAI | Vercel AI Gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| Models | 16 models on seven lines: Claude, GPT, Grok, GLM, Kimi and DeepSeek (the last three private deployments), 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%; the GLM, Kimi and DeepSeek models at fixed private-deployment rates; Jev $0.055 | The provider's list price with no markup and no platform fee; some models discounted for everyone; volume discounts by agreement |
| Free start | None at sign-up; every top-up earns a 3–12% bonus by amount, the first one 10% more | $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; the Fable 5.2 row was checked on November 10 and the Jev row on November 12. 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 5.2 | Shared | $4 / $20 | $8 / $40 | 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 |
| Jev | Official | $0.055 input | $0.042 input | TopxAI 31% higher |
Cache prices follow the same ratio on the shared routes. For Sonnet 5.5, a cache read costs $0.05 per million tokens on TopxAI and $0.10 on Vercel, and a 5-minute cache write $1.25 against $2.50. (Corrected October 23, 2026: this sentence first gave $0.10 against $0.20. Vercel's model API, checked that day, lists Sonnet 5.5 cache reads at Anthropic's $0.10, and TopxAI charged that same $0.10 until it corrected its own table that day.) 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.
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-5-5is $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 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://api.topxai.xyz/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
Related
- Every model's price
- TopxAI vs OpenRouter: what is the same and what differs
- TopxAI vs the providers' own APIs: price, retention and what stays direct
- Shared pool, official line and auto route
- Vercel AI SDK with TopxAI: createOpenAI, createAnthropic and openai-compatible
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 API pricing
- GPT-6.1 Sol API pricing
- Grok 4.7 API pricing
Previous: TopxAI vs the providers' own APIs: price, retention and what stays direct · Next: What TopxAI stores and what it never stores
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