Get Started

AI Gateway offers a unified API to multiple providers with budgets, monitoring, load-balancing, and fallbacks. Choose a quickstart based on what you want to build.

Set up your project

Create a new directory and initialize a Node.js project.

mkdir ai-text-demo && cd ai-text-demo
pnpm init

Install dependencies

Install the AI SDK and development dependencies.

pnpm add ai dotenv @types/node tsx typescript

Set up your API key

Create an API key in your Vercel dashboard and save it to your environment file.

AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

Alternatively, use OIDC tokens for automatic authentication in Vercel deployments.

Create and run your script

Save this script as index.ts and run it with tsx.

import { streamText } from 'ai';
import 'dotenv/config';

async function main() {
  const result = streamText({
    model: 'openai/gpt-4.1',
    prompt: 'Invent a new holiday and describe its traditions.',
  });

  for await (const textPart of result.textStream) {
    process.stdout.write(textPart);
  }

  console.log();
  console.log('Token usage:', await result.usage);
}

main().catch(console.error);

pnpm tsx index.ts

Next steps: Learn about provider routing, OpenAI compatibility, or try other SDKs like Anthropic.

Learn more about AI Gateway features including OpenAI compatibility, provider routing, and bring your own keys (BYOK).