Vercel’s AI Gateway numbers show open-weight models are winning on usage and catching up on spending.
- Open-weight models processed 71.5% of gateway tokens, and the majority for the first time in August.
- Their share of spend more than quadrupled, from about 1 in 20 dollars in June to nearly 1 in 4 in September.
- Gateway spending in September was about 13x December 2025, while the average price per token fell about 47%.
- Almost one in three teams switched their most-used provider in September.
Caveat: the gateway works with harnesses like Claude Code and Codex, but it only sees its own traffic, not direct vendor use or self-hosting.
My take
Teams are routing the bulk of their work to cheaper open models and saving premium models for the hard stuff. A third of teams switching providers in a month also tells you lock-in is weak right now, which is good for all of us.
