Vercel has opened its AI Gateway to Ling 3.1 Flash 1019, a model built for coding and agents that juggle tools. Developers can try it at no cost for a limited window, but what happens when the free period ends? The answer depends on how far your projects can stretch before billing begins.
Vercel's AI Gateway now offers Ling 3.1 Flash 1019 from InclusionAI at no cost until November 3, 2026. The model is built for coding, multi-step reasoning, and agents that use tools, and its 1M-token context window is meant for long documents, code, and extended task histories.
Developers can call it through the AI SDK by passing the model ID inclusionai/ling-3.1-flash-1019 to streamText, then reading the output from result.textStream. Free requests still appear in the spend dashboard with a full request trace. They just cost nothing until billing begins.
To use the model in coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, install the latest Vercel CLI and run npx vercel ai-gateway setup, then select inclusionai/ling-3.1-flash-1019 in the agent. Vercel also provides a model playground for trying the model before integrating it.
Key Features at a Glance
Context window: 1M tokens – supports long documents, large codebases, and extended task histories in one session.
Target workloads: Coding, multi-step reasoning, and tool-using agents – the model is designed for these tasks.
Unified API: One interface for calling models, tracking usage and cost, and setting up retries and failover.
Budgets for API keys: Spending limits per key help teams control costs.
Routing rules and Zero Data Retention: Built-in options for directing traffic and handling data retention.
No markup: AI Gateway reflects provider pricing with no platform fee on inference, including Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) requests.
Availability
Ling 3.1 Flash 1019 is free on AI Gateway until November 3, 2026. On November 3, requests begin charging at the published rate. The model is available through the AI Gateway model page and the model playground, and you can browse all language models on AI Gateway at vercel.com/ai-gateway/models?type=text.
Ling-3.1-flash is a hybrid-linear mixture-of-experts model with 560 billion total parameters and approximately 25 billion active parameters per token. It supports a context window of up to 1,048,576 tokens, a maximum input length of 1,048,576 tokens, and a maximum output length of 262,144 tokens.
The model accepts and produces text, supports function calling, structured outputs, prefix completion, and context caching, and does not support web search, batch inference, or fine-tuning according to Alibaba Cloud’s model documentation.
