Spending on Vercel's AI Gateway in September was about 13 times its December level, even as the average price per token fell 47% over the same period, according to the October edition of the company's AI Gateway Production Index.
The index draws on anonymised, aggregate traffic routed through the gateway, which carries tens of trillions of tokens between production applications and AI labs. It shows businesses using far more AI, switching models freely and moving towards open-weight alternatives.
Open-weight models now process 71.5% of all tokens on the gateway, up from 56% in August, and account for 23% of spending, more than four times their share in June. Cheap models drive the token growth while expensive ones drive the spend. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash handled nearly half of September's tokens but took just 2.6% of spend.
US-based providers are earning from Chinese models. Nearly 70% of gateway spending on Chinese-developed models went through US providers in September, up from under 10% in December, which works out at about $2.50 through US providers for every $1 through China-based ones.
Customers are not staying put. Nearly one in three teams changed their most-used AI lab in September, an index record, and almost half switched their most-used model. Model and lab switching have both risen for five consecutive months.
The September launch scorecard shows a split between reach and revenue. Jev became the fastest-adopted model in gateway history, reaching 35% of paid teams in its first two weeks, but took a fraction of a percent of spend. Opus 5.5 took more than one in ten gateway dollars in its first two weeks, the largest spend share of any September launch. Anthropic's overall share of gateway spend fell below half for the first time, from 63.7% to 43.9%.
Vercel also announced new AI Gateway capabilities at its Ship SF event this week, including spending controls for teams and projects, US-only inference and Zero Data Retention options. The full index and a recap of the Ship announcements are available from Vercel.
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