Direct answer: treat routing as a controlled business decision
Vercel presents AI Gateway as one access layer for hundreds of text, image, video and audio models. Its official product page says teams can route for availability, cost or latency, use automatic fallbacks when a provider is unavailable, and consolidate billing and observability. It also describes compatibility with existing OpenAI, Anthropic and AI SDK integrations through a base-URL change, plus the option to bring existing provider keys. These are platform capabilities, not proof that every application will become cheaper, faster or continuously available.
The practical decision is therefore not simply whether to buy a gateway. It is whether a gateway can enforce the routing policy, evidence trail and human approval model your application needs. CreatikLab’s operational rule is: do not enable dynamic routing until the team has defined acceptable models, quality tests, maximum spend, latency indicators, fallback behavior and an accountable owner. A gateway can centralize controls, but it cannot decide which business compromises are acceptable.
