Getting Started

What is the AI Gateway?

The AI Gateway is a drop-in OpenAI-compatible proxy that routes your requests across multiple free-tier AI providers. Point your existing OpenAI SDK or curl commands at the gateway and get resilient, load-balanced inference without managing individual provider keys.

Supported providers:

• Cloudflare Workers AI — fast inference at the edge
• Groq — ultra-low latency with LPU hardware
• Google Gemini — large context windows, multimodal
• OpenRouter — aggregated access to many models
• Cerebras — high-throughput open-weight models
• Voyage AI — purpose-built embedding models

Key Features

• Health-aware routing — the gateway tracks provider health and automatically skips degraded or rate-limited backends
• Auto round-robin — when model is set to "auto", requests are distributed across healthy providers
• Streaming — full server-sent events (SSE) support for all chat endpoints
• Embeddings — unified /v1/embeddings endpoint backed by Workers AI, Gemini, and Voyage AI
• Analytics — per-request logging with a dashboard at /usage
• OpenAI-compatible — works with any client that supports the OpenAI API format

Quick Start

Send your first request in under a minute.

curl

curl https://your-gateway.workers.dev/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <GATEWAY_API_KEY>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "auto",
    "messages": [
      { "role": "user", "content": "Hello! What can you do?" }
    ]
  }'

JavaScript

const response = await fetch('https://your-gateway.workers.dev/v1/chat/completions', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': 'Bearer <GATEWAY_API_KEY>',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    model: 'auto',
    messages: [
      { role: 'user', content: 'Hello! What can you do?' },
    ],
  }),
});

const data = await response.json();
console.log(data.choices[0].message.content);

OpenAI SDK

import OpenAI from 'openai';

const client = new OpenAI({
  baseURL: 'https://your-gateway.workers.dev/v1',
  apiKey: '<GATEWAY_API_KEY>',
});

const completion = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: 'auto',
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Hello! What can you do?' }],
});

console.log(completion.choices[0].message.content);

Next Steps

• Authentication — learn how to obtain and use your API key
• Chat Completions — full reference for the chat endpoint
• Embeddings — generate vector embeddings
• Models — list available models and their capabilities