//Compare>Nous Portal vs Vercel AI Gateway

Nous Portal API keys bill per token from a credit balance, at the prices on the models page, and no subscription is needed for the API. API keys always use your credits, not a plan's included usage. Top-ups are paid by card through Stripe. For API calls, x402 (beta) lets you pay per request in Solana USDC with no account, API key or prepaid credits.

Vercel AI Gateway also bills pay-as-you-go: it charges the provider's list price from prepaid credits, with no markup or platform fee, and some models are priced below list. You cover any payment processing fees, and purchased credits expire one year after purchase. Enterprise teams can arrange custom discounts with invoice payment.

Nous Portal offers free models, and the Free filter on the models page shows the current list. On Nov 9, 2026, Step 3.7 Flash and LongCat 2.5 were free on Nous Portal and listed as paid on Vercel AI Gateway, and Solar Mini 4 was free on Nous Portal and not listed there. The Free plan covers free models with standard rate limits.

Vercel AI Gateway lists some free models of its own, including Beam 1.0. Its free tier gives each team a monthly credit for a subset of models, at lower rate limits. The team must add a payment method first, and the free credit no longer applies once the team buys credits.

Nous Portal lists hundreds of models, with new frontier models the day they launch, including Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM and MiniMax, with prices per million tokens. Selected models sell below their list price, and the Discounted filter on the models page shows the current list.

On Nov 9, 2026, Tencent Hy4 cost 60% less on Nous Portal than on Vercel AI Gateway, and GLM-5.3 Flash cost 20% less. Other discounted models, such as Gemini 4 Argon and Gemini 3.7 Flash, cost the same on both.

Nous Portal is one account for Hermes Agent, the Nous inference API and Hermes Cloud. The Hermes Agent docs call Nous Portal the recommended way to run Hermes Agent. One command, hermes setup --portal, signs Hermes Agent in, lets you pick a model and turns on the Tool Gateway. Hermes Desktop does the same in one click.

Plus, Super and Ultra include Hermes Agent usage, within limits that reset daily, weekly and monthly. You can use any model, and pricier models use your included usage faster. If you use it up, you can switch to a free model, wait for the reset or continue with pay-as-you-go credits. Hermes Business gives a team a shared Hermes Agent deployment with one balance and per-member caps.

Vercel AI Gateway is pay-as-you-go. Token Pass, a monthly subscription in Early Access for Vercel Pro teams, buys credit for featured open-weight models. Vercel's docs say Hermes Agent ships an AI Gateway provider, and one Vercel CLI command provisions a key and adds it to Hermes Agent's configuration.

On paid plans, the Tool Gateway gives Hermes Agent web search, page extraction, image generation, text-to-speech, speech-to-text and a cloud browser, with no separate vendor accounts or keys. Hermes Agent can switch any single tool to your own vendor key whenever you want.

Vercel AI Gateway has built-in web search from Perplexity, Exa, Tako, Browserbase and Parallel that works with any model, and Browserbase Fetch or DeepSeek Fetch retrieves a page the model already has a URL for. Each search is billed per request.

Every paid Nous Portal plan includes one Hermes Cloud agent, up to the plan's included size: up to 4 GB RAM and 25 GB disk on Plus, 4 GB RAM and 100 GB disk on Super, and 8 GB RAM and 100 GB disk on Ultra. Larger or extra agents bill daily from credits.

Hermes Cloud runs Hermes Agent around the clock in the nearest available region. Each agent gets its own hardened container, and its files, memory and configuration persist whether it is running or stopped.

Vercel documents no hosted agent in Vercel AI Gateway. Its agent guide covers building your own agent with the AI SDK and pairs the gateway with separate products: Vercel Sandbox runs agent code in isolated microVMs, Chat SDK connects it to chat platforms, Vercel Connect gives it scoped API access and the Workflow SDK keeps it running.