Vercel Adds Video Generation to AI Gateway With Free Grok Access
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch just announced that the Vercel AI Gateway now supports video generation, alongside a new open source Creative Studio powered by xAI's Grok. The announcement, which has already racked up over 13 million views on X, also comes with a limited-time offer: Grok Imagine Video and Image generation are completely free until February 25.
What Vercel Just Shipped
The Vercel AI Gateway — the company's unified interface for accessing AI models — now includes video generation capabilities through Grok. This means developers deploying on Vercel can access text, image, and video generation through a single account with unified billing across hundreds of AI models.
To showcase the new capability, Vercel built an open source Creative Studio using v0, their AI-powered code generation tool. The studio lets users create images and videos, or even build their own custom design tools — all powered by Grok's models.
The Technical Details That Matter
Vercel Workflows for reliability: Video generation can take a long time. Users might restart their browsers or lose their WiFi or LTE connection mid-generation. Vercel Workflows handle this automatically, ensuring the generation process continues even if the user's connection drops.
Visual vector search: The Creative Studio includes instant vector search powered by mixedbread.ai. The system indexes generated content visually, so searching for "black feline" actually returns images of cats. This semantic understanding goes beyond simple keyword matching.
Unified model access: All existing and future Grok models are accessible through the gateway without any extra setup. When you deploy to Vercel, you get access to hundreds of models with a single account and unified billing.
The Platform Play
This move is clearly about more than just adding another feature. Vercel is positioning itself as the one-stop platform for AI-powered development. By offering free access to Grok's image and video generation — even temporarily — they're hoping to get developers hooked on the convenience of unified billing and a single integration point.
The strategy mirrors what cloud providers have done for years: offer generous free tiers to build habit and lock-in, then monetize once developers are too integrated to easily switch.
The Competition
Vercel isn't the only company trying to be the "gateway to all AI models." Platforms like Replicate, Together AI, and even cloud giants like AWS Bedrock are all competing for the same developer mindshare. The question is whether developers will actually consolidate their AI usage through a single gateway, or continue picking best-of-breed tools for each specific task.
The Creative Studio being open source is a smart move — it lowers the barrier to trying the platform and gives developers something tangible to experiment with immediately.
Bottom Line
Vercel's addition of video generation to their AI Gateway, combined with free Grok access and an open source Creative Studio, is a bold play to become the default platform for AI-powered development. The technical foundations — reliable workflows, visual search, unified billing — are solid. But the real test is whether developers want a single platform for everything, or prefer to keep their options open. The free access window closes tomorrow, so the clock is ticking.