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Free during alpha

The VLM Run Gateway is currently free to use and rate-limited per IP or API key. Authenticating with a key raises your quota. See Rate Limits for the per-tier limits and how to request a higher quota.
The VLM Run Gateway accepts a standard Authorization: Bearer <token> header on every endpoint. All Gateway endpoints allow anonymous access today, so authentication is optional. Sign in with an API key when you want usage attributed to your account instead of a shared IP bucket.

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Tiers

Authenticating raises your quota and changes attribution: anonymous requests are capped per IP (so they can be shared with other users behind the same NAT or proxy), while authenticated requests get the higher limit above, capped per account.

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Tier resolution

The Gateway resolves your tier from the Authorization header in this order:
  1. No header → anonymous.
  2. Bearer "" or Bearer vlmrun → anonymous. vlmrun is a documented sentinel for SDKs and clients that require a non-empty API key value.
  3. Valid VLM Run API key → authenticated.
  4. Any other non-empty bearer token → 403 (invalid API key). The Gateway does not fall back to anonymous access for unrecognized tokens.
Every endpoint documented under API Reference accepts anonymous traffic today: chat completions, models, embeddings, audio transcriptions, and health. This may tighten as the Gateway moves toward general availability, so authenticate with an API key if you’re building something you plan to run in production.

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Get an API key

  1. Sign up at app.vlm.run.
  2. Copy your API key from the dashboard.
  3. Set it as an environment variable:

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Examples

An invalid (non-empty, unrecognized) bearer token returns 403 rather than falling back to anonymous access. See Error Codes for the response body.

Rate Limits

Per-tier quotas and how to request a higher limit.

Error Codes

403 (invalid API key) and 429 (rate limit) response bodies.