TrustedRouter vs Vercel AI Gateway
Compare TrustedRouter and Vercel AI Gateway across APIs, deployment, routing, billing, observability, content handling, and verifiable privacy.
Use Vercel where it fits. Use TrustedRouter when the gateway itself needs proof.
Vercel AI Gateway pairs naturally with the AI SDK, and it also works standalone with just an API key: zero token markup across 327 models as of August 2026. TrustedRouter focuses on a different problem: hosted routing where the prompt gateway publishes verifiable build and image evidence.
Use TrustedRouter when you want provider fallback, BYOK, prepaid credits, public status, and a source-available control plane around an attested API path.
Route across providers with proof.
Choose models directly or let trustedrouter/auto pick a healthy route.
Open security notesA router you can audit.
Centralized AI gateways are convenient. TrustedRouter keeps the convenience while making the hosted gateway evidence public, so developers can audit the code path instead of relying only on product claims.
Sources checked August 16, 2026
- Vercel AI Gateway pricing (no-markup terms, add-on fees)https://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/pricing
- Vercel AI Gateway Zero Data Retention dochttps://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/security-and-compliance/zdr
- Vercel disallow-prompt-training dochttps://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/security-and-compliance/disallow-prompt-training
- Vercel AI Gateway logs and transcripts dochttps://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/observability-and-spend/logs
- Vercel AI Gateway BYOK dochttps://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/authentication-and-byok/byok
- Vercel AI Gateway GA announcement (2025-08-21)https://vercel.com/blog/ai-gateway-is-now-generally-available
- Vercel platform compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA)https://vercel.com/docs/security/compliance
- Vercel AI Gateway public models endpointhttps://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/models
- TrustedRouter monthly benchmark reportsStable first-party route evidence
- TrustedRouter live trust recordRelease and attestation evidence
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Questions
Vercel charges nothing on tokens. Why pay TrustedRouter's 5.5%?
Vercel's zero token markup is real, documented, and includes BYOK; if the lowest fee is the deciding criterion, choose Vercel. TrustedRouter's 5.5% on provider cost (with a $0.01/M floor) buys a different property: a gateway whose no-durable-prompt-log behavior is backed by published source and live attestation on three clouds, plus zdr, e2e, and eu privacy routes for every customer with no surcharge.
Both gateways say they do not retain prompts. What is actually different?
The mechanism. Vercel's ZDR doc states a policy for a closed-source hosted service; you cannot check it from outside, and dashboard logs can capture full transcripts when content capture is available. TrustedRouter publishes the gateway source and live attestation endpoints on GCP, AWS Nitro, and Azure, so you can verify the running build matches the published code. On both platforms the claim stops at the gateway: downstream model providers are covered by policy, except TrustedRouter's e2e routes to confidential-compute providers.
Can I keep using the AI SDK if I switch to TrustedRouter?
Yes. The AI SDK is Apache-2.0 and provider-agnostic, and we maintain an MIT-licensed AI SDK provider package. You must configure it explicitly, because plain model strings default to Vercel's Gateway. Realtime voice, speech, transcription, and reranking calls have no TrustedRouter equivalent and would stay on Vercel.