Netlify AI Gateway

The strongest thing about Netlify AI Gateway is that it removes a category of work rather than adding a feature. You do not create four provider accounts, you do not store four keys in environment variables, and you do not reconcile four invoices at the end of the month. Netlify injects API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, and TypeSafe AI, plus a custom base URL per provider, into every compute context — Functions, Edge Functions, Preview Server — so the official client libraries pick them up with no extra configuration. The OpenRouter SDK needs 1.2.43 or later; everything else works out of the box. Because it's a proxy at the environment-variable layer, it inherits your framework rather than constraining it. Astro, TanStack Start, Next.js, Gatsby, and Nuxt all compile server-side code into Netlify Functions and Edge Functions during the build, which means the same injected variables are available there with no settings to change. You can also skip the SDKs and hit provider REST APIs directly, or route OpenRouter-hosted models through the OpenAI SDK using OpenRouter notation. That flexibility matters if you've already written code against a specific provider's client. Where it's honest about its own boundaries: the gateway is credit-based only and available on Free, Personal, and Pro; Enterprise customers have to ask their Account Manager. A project needs at least one production deploy before the gateway activates, which trips up people who scaffold locally and expect environment variables to appear immediately. And the pricing model itself is the biggest thing to reason about — token usage converts into Netlify credits against your existing quota, which is convenient for one bill but usually loses to direct provider list pricing at real production volume. On privacy, the gateway states plainly that it does not store your prompts or model outputs, and there's a documented security-and-privacy page plus an opt-out path if you'd rather inject your own keys. That's the level of disclosure you want on a proxy that sits between your code and four vendors. Where it doesn't fit: anywhere that isn't Netlify. There is no standalone mode, no self-hosted deployment, and no path to fine-tuned or dedicated model hosting. If your AI workload is the product rather than a feature of the product, direct provider billing plus an observability stack of your own is the more defensible architecture. If your AI workload is a chat widget, a summarizer, or a natural-language search box on a site you already host on Netlify, this is the shortest path from idea to deploy.