Whenever a shiny new product drops — like Vercel’s AI Gateway (InfoQ article here) or the already-established OpenRouter — it’s tempting to think “I should add this to my stack right now.” But here’s the truth: whether you need these tools or not depends heavily on where you are in your AI journey.
Early Stage: Just Trying to Ship Something
If you’re just experimenting or building your first AI-powered feature, you probably don’t need a gateway. At this point, the complexity of multi-model routing, failover, and cost dashboards might be overkill. One API key, one model provider, and a clear sense of what you’re building is usually enough. Adding an abstraction layer too early can slow you down.
Focus here: ship quickly, learn what your users actually need, and avoid premature optimization.
Growth Stage: Multiple Models, More Users
Once you’ve got traction, a gateway starts to make sense. You’ll notice pain points like:
- Vendor lock-in — you don’t want to be tied to just one model if pricing or performance shifts.
- Latency / uptime — customers won’t tolerate downtime or slow responses.
- Cost creep — surprise API bills become real if you’re scaling usage.
This is when something like Vercel or OpenRouter adds value. They abstract away some of the messy parts, give you flexibility in choosing models, and add observability.
Mature Stage: Enterprise, Governance, and Scale
If you’re operating at enterprise scale, with compliance and governance requirements, gateways almost become mandatory. You’ll want:
- Auditability: which model handled which request.
- Failover / SLA confidence: uptime is a business promise, not just a “nice to have.”
- Cost & performance visibility: dashboards you can hand to finance and ops.
- Governance controls: not every team should be able to spin up any model, any time.
At this point, the question isn’t “should we use a gateway?” but rather “which gateway, and how do we integrate it with our platform (e.g. Snowflake AI)?”
So, Do You Need One Now?
- If you’re just prototyping → no, stick with one provider.
- If you’re scaling users and models → yes, consider a gateway.
- If you’re enterprise-mature → yes, it’s almost table stakes.
Closing Thought
Products like Vercel’s AI Gateway or OpenRouter are signals of where the ecosystem is heading: less duct tape, more production-grade infrastructure. But the right time to adopt them depends on your journey. The goal isn’t to use all the new tools — it’s to pick the ones that solve the problems you actually have, at the stage you’re in.