# Vercel — How Tailscale built a customer-facing model router on AI Gateway

- Company: Vercel (vercel.com)
- Announced: 2026-09-11T04:00:00+00:00
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://vercel.com/blog/how-tailscale-built-a-customer-facing-model-router-on-ai-gateway
- Record: https://forck.live/items/20659-how-tailscale-built-a-customer-facing-model-router-on-ai-gateway
- Subject: v0 / AI SDK / AI Gateway
- Pricing: AI Gateway doesn't mark up token costs on any provider or model, including when Tailscale's customers bring their own keys. Aperture's customers pay the same rate they would going direct, across every model in the catalog.

Tailscale built Aperture, a customer-facing model router, on Vercel AI Gateway and Vercel Sandbox. AI Gateway provides a single API across hundreds of models and returns cost and usage per request, eliminating the need for Tailscale to maintain provider price tables. Vercel Sandbox enables secure agent execution inside a customer's tailnet without issuing API keys to agents.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://vercel.com/blog/how-tailscale-built-a-customer-facing-model-router-on-ai-gateway:

> AI Gateway gives Aperture one API across hundreds of models, and returns cost and usage on every request, so Aperture can surface spend to customers without Tailscale maintaining price tables for each provider.

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