Product vacua with boundary states (PVBS) are cousins of the Heisenberg XXZ spin model and feature [Formula: see text] particle species on [Formula: see text]. The PVBS models were originally introduced as toy models for the classification of ground state phases. A crucial ingredient for this classification is the existence of a spectral gap above the ground state sector. In this work, we derive a spectral gap for PVBS models at arbitrary species number [Formula: see text] and in arbitrary dimension [Formula: see text] in the perturbative regime of small anisotropy parameters. Instead of using the more common martingale method, the proof verifies a finite-size criterion in the spirit of Knabe.