Hi Vercel Team, I’m experiencing a 403 Forbidden error when using Vercel AI Gateway, even though my account has a valid payment method attached and I still have free AI credits remaining. The API key appears to be valid because the /v1/models endpoint works, but /v1/chat/completions is blocked. T…

I’m experiencing the exact same issue. Since yesterday (May 24, 2026), most of the AI Gateway models suddenly stopped working when using free credits. Previously, this restriction was only applied to flagship models like Claude Opus and Gemini Pro, but now it seems models like Sonnet, DeepSeek and G…

Hello Vercel Team, I am writing to report that I am experiencing the same issue. It appears that the majority of models are currently unavailable through the AI Gateway. While I understand that flagship models may be restricted for users on free credits, the outage currently extends to most models…

I also met the same issue when using deepseek-v4-flash. {“error”:{“message”:“Free tier users do not have access to this model. Upgrade to paid credits at Vercel for unrestricted access.”,“type”:“no_providers_available”,“param”:{“error”:“Free tier users do not have access to this model. Upgrade to p…

Same issue as wowpala. Either the documentation is wrong in implying that the deepseek-v4-flash model will use free credits, or the error is the source of truth and it’s a restricted paid-only model (for some reason). Which is it? If documentation is outdated, then it should be updated, clearly. T…

I’m experiencing the same issue and wanted to share the response I received from the support team. The Problem: When trying to call models like Gemini and gpt-image-2 with only free credits, I receive the error: “Free tier users do not have access to this model.” Support Team Response: The Vercel …

I have the same issue with deepseek-v4-flash, free tier. Then when I login to Vercel AI Gateway dashboard to test the model from Vercel directly, the Add payment alert pops up, despite I already have credit on file. https://vercel.com/my-project/~/ai-gateway/models/deepseek-v4-flash [image] http…

Hi, I see many people having the same problem, so I wanted to ask. I get proprietary models were limited to stop abuse. But now it looks like the same limits are also on open-weight models. The models that are still available have very tight rate limits. It is hard to use them. I checked the AI Ga…

AI Gateway returns 403 Forbidden despite valid payment method and free credits

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abdurrahmanxai-6285 (Abdurrahmanxai 6285) May 26, 2026, 2:37pm 5

I have this issue as well. I created a similar case. AI Gateway requests blocked despite purchased AI Gateway credit and payment method

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AI Gateway returns 403 Forbidden despite valid payment method and free credits

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