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Hi everyone,
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I’m running into a strange Vercel AI Gateway BYOK issue and would appreciate help from the Vercel team.
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Summary:
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My app uses Vercel AI Gateway with BYOK for an Azure-backed GPT model. The same AI Gateway API key and same model work locally, but fail when called from a Vercel Production deployment.
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Error:
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The Production request fails with HTTP 403:
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byok_requires_paid_credits
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Message:
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Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) is available only with paid credits.
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What is confusing:
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I have AI Gateway credits available on the relevant Vercel account/team. Also, from the same Production runtime, calling `gateway.getCredits()` succeeds and returns a positive balance.
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What I verified:
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- `AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY` is present in the Vercel Production runtime.
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- The key length matches the expected key.
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- `VERCEL_OIDC_TOKEN` is not present in the runtime diagnostic.
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- `gateway.getCredits()` succeeds in Production.
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- `generateText()` fails in Production with `byok_requires_paid_credits`.
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- The exact same API key and exact same model work locally.
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- The local request successfully routes through BYOK to Azure.
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- The Production failed request shows `providerAttemptCount: 0`, so it appears to fail before any actual provider attempt is made.
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The model used is:
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azure/gpt-5.4-mini
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A representative failed Gateway routing object from Production:
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{
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  "originalModelId": "azure/gpt-5.4-mini",
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  "resolvedProvider": "azure",
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  "fallbacksAvailable": ["openai"],
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  "canonicalSlug": "openai/gpt-5.4-mini",
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  "modelAttemptCount": 1,
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  "modelAttempts": [
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    {
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      "canonicalSlug": "openai/gpt-5.4-mini",
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      "success": false,
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      "providerAttemptCount": 0,
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      "providerAttempts": []
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    }
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  ],
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  "totalProviderAttemptCount": 0
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}
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The local successful request, using the same key and model, shows:
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{
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  "finalProvider": "azure",
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  "credentialType": "byok",
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  "statusCode": 200
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}
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Question:
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Is AI Gateway applying a different BYOK / paid credits eligibility check when the request originates from a Vercel Production runtime, compared with a local request using the same AI Gateway API key?
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It looks like the API key itself is valid, because:
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1. It works locally.
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2. `getCredits()` works from Production.
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3. The failure happens before provider execution.
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I can provide private details such as project ID, deployment ID, log links, and generation IDs to Vercel staff if needed, but I prefer not to post them publicly.
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Thanks.