What is a gateway funding fee?

A percentage charged when you buy credits from the gateway, for example 5.5% on OpenRouter Standard or 5% on Cloudflare Unified Billing.

Do gateways mark up tokens?

The gateways we checked pass provider list prices through with no markup; resellers such as Flatkey price per model.

Fees defined

Almost every LLM gateway charges nothing per token on top of provider list prices. The money is in four other places.

1. Token markup

An extra percentage on the provider's token price. Zero for OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway and Cloudflare in the sources we read. Resellers (Flatkey) set their own per-model prices, which can be below or above list.

Charging this layer: none of the gateways we could price.

2. Funding fee

A percentage charged when you buy credits. OpenRouter: 5.5% (Standard) or 8% (Business), with own keys free up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month then 5%. Cloudflare Unified Billing: 5%. Vercel: none, but you pay payment-processing fees.

OpenRouter: 5.5%
Cloudflare AI Gateway: 5%

3. Logs and platform

What you pay to record requests. Units differ: Portkey counts recorded logs, Helicone counts requests, Langfuse counts units, Datadog and Arize count spans, Logfire counts records. Our calculator treats one request as one unit. A real application usually produces several spans per request, so span-priced tools cost more than the calculator shows.

4. Seats

Per-user charges: TrueFoundry Pro $25 per user, LangSmith Plus $39 per seat, Logfire extra seats $25.

Own keys (BYOK)

With your own provider keys you pay the provider directly. Gateways differ on whether that is free (Vercel paid tier, Cloudflare), free up to a cap (OpenRouter), or the only way it works (Portkey, Helicone, LiteLLM).

What is not a layer here

Add-ons such as Vercel team-wide zero data retention ($0.10 per 1,000 requests) are listed on the vendor page but are not in the calculator.