The Vercel announcement, while framed as a model access story, is fundamentally a distribution play. The AI Gateway service appears to be the real product being marketed, with the DeepSeek discount serving as a temporary lure. This strategy may reflect the difficulty of differentiating pure routing services in a market where model providers are building their own direct APIs and larger cloud platforms bundle inference with broader suites.
The promotion's short duration suggests it's a customer acquisition tactic rather than a sustainable price advantage, and its success likely hinges on whether developers find enough value in the gateway's abstraction layer to stay after the discount expires.