AI Summary
About
Portkey is an AI gateway and LLMOps governance platform. A drop-in proxy in front of any LLM provider, it gives engineering teams a universal API, automatic fallbacks, load balancing, retries, caching, guardrails, prompt management, and full observability (logs, traces, costs) across 1,600+ models from 45+ providers. Founded by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg, Portkey raised a $3M seed in August 2023 led by Lightspeed, and a $15M Series A in February 2026 led by Elevation Capital — by which point it was processing 500B+ tokens and 120M requests daily for 24,000+ organizations. The core gateway is open source under an MIT license with roughly 12,000 GitHub stars.
In 2026, Palo Alto Networks acquired Portkey — announced April 30, closed May 29 — to integrate the gateway into its Prisma AIRS AI security platform as a centralized control plane for monitoring and governing AI agents. The standalone pricing page remains live, and the open-source gateway remains available.
For the most current information, visit Portkey.
Pricing summary : How Portkey’s pricing model works
Portkey bills a flat subscription metered on recorded logs — every request that passes through the gateway and gets logged. Developer is free forever (10,000 logs/month, 3-day log retention, 3 prompt templates, community support) and explicitly positioned for prototyping and enterprise POCs, “not suitable for production workloads.” Production is $49/month with 100,000 recorded logs included, then $9 per additional 100K requests, up to 3 million — plus 30-day log retention, RBAC, service-account API keys, semantic caching, alerts, and unlimited prompt templates. Enterprise is custom-quoted for 10M+ logs/month and adds private cloud/VPC deployment, SOC2 Type 2/GDPR/HIPAA compliance, custom BAAs, SSO, granular budget and rate limits, and custom retention.
Two graceful touches: on Developer, exceeding 10K logs doesn’t break your requests — traffic keeps flowing, only the excess simply isn’t recorded; and the overage ladder has a hard ceiling — overage is only sold up to 3 million requests, beyond which you’re routed to sales (see Hidden costs for the ceiling math).
What makes this different: the gateway itself is MIT-licensed and free to self-host with no request limit — what you pay for is the hosted control plane: observability, prompt management, guardrails, and governance. And while the $49 sticker is identical to the 2023 launch price, the meter underneath has been rebuilt: included usage fell from 1M requests to 100K logs and the per-100K overage rate more than quadrupled (see Pricing evolution).
Pricing by product
| Tier | Price | Included | Key mechanics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | Free | 10K recorded logs/mo, 3-day log retention, 3 prompt templates | Free forever; overflow requests still work, just unlogged; no overage allowed |
| Production | $49/mo | 100K recorded logs/mo, 30-day log / 90-day metric retention | +$9 per 100K requests, hard stop at 3M; RBAC, semantic caching, alerts |
| Enterprise | Custom | 10M+ logs/mo, custom retention | SOC2 Type 2/GDPR/HIPAA, BAAs, VPC/private cloud, SSO, budget & rate limits |
| Open Source (self-host) | Free | No request limit | MIT license; gateway features (routing, fallbacks, guardrails) without the hosted control plane |
Sales motions across products: self-serve PLG for Developer and Production (instant signup, card checkout), open-source self-host as the developer funnel, and sales-led for Enterprise (“Talk to Us”, scheduled calls, custom deployment configurations).
Hidden costs : What Portkey users actually pay
The $49 floor is honest, but the included allotment is small for a production gateway: 100,000 logs is roughly 3,300 requests a day. Any real workload lives in the overage ladder, at $9 per 100K requests — and at 3M requests/month you hit the self-serve ceiling and must negotiate an Enterprise contract.
| Line item | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Production base plan | $49 |
| Overage — 500K requests/mo (4 × $9) | $36 |
| Overage — 1M requests/mo (9 × $9) | $81 |
| Maximum self-serve (3M requests) | $310 |
| Estimated total (1M-request production app) | ~$130 |
Other things to budget for: log retention is short (3 days on Developer, 30 days on Production) and metric retention on Production quietly dropped from 365 to 90 days — long-horizon analysis pushes you toward Enterprise’s custom retention. Compliance (SOC2 Type 2, HIPAA, BAAs), SSO, and budget/rate-limit governance are all Enterprise-gated, so the features most relevant to controlling AI spend at scale sit behind a sales call. Self-hosting the MIT gateway is free but forgoes hosted observability and prompt management entirely.
Want to estimate your own Portkey bill? Use the Portkey pricing calculator to model your costs based on usage patterns.
Pricing evolution : Portkey pricing history and changes
Cadence
| Period | Price changes | Product / SKU additions | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 H2 | Launch | Developer / Business / Enterprise | Business $49 (vs struck $99), 1M req + $2/100K |
| 2024 H1 | Business $49→$99 | — | Promo ends; struck anchor rises to $149 |
| 2024 H2 | Production $49, overage $2→$9 | Logs-metered restructure | Included usage cut 10x to 100K logs; Enterprise from $499 |
| 2025 | — | Enterprise floor unpublished | $499 anchor removed; structure stable |
| 2026 | — | — | Same tiers; metrics retention 365→90 days; Palo Alto Networks acquisition |
Tracked range: 2023–present, via Wayback Machine snapshots (2023-11, 2024-05, 2024-09, 2025-01, 2025-12) and a live 2026-06-10 capture.
Notable changes
- 2023-11 — First archived pricing: Developer free (10K requests/mo, 7-day log retention), Business $49/month shown against a struck-through $99 — 1M requests included, then $2 per 100K — and custom Enterprise (SOC 2/GDPR/ISO, PII anonymizer).
- 2024-05 — Launch promo ends: Business rises to $99/month (against a struck-through $149), still 1M requests included.
- 2024-09 — The big restructure: Business becomes Production at $49/month, but the meter shifts from requests to recorded logs, included usage drops to 100K, and overage rises to $9 per 100K. Enterprise is listed at $499/month onwards.
- 2025-01 — The $499 Enterprise anchor disappears; Enterprise becomes pure “Custom Pricing”.
- 2026-02 — $15M Series A led by Elevation Capital; Portkey reports 500B+ daily tokens, 120M daily requests, 24,000+ organizations.
- 2026-04/05 — Palo Alto Networks acquires Portkey (announced April 30, closed May 29) for integration into Prisma AIRS. Pricing page unchanged; Production metrics retention now reads 90 days (previously 365).
What’s unique : Portkey’s distinctive pricing mechanics
1. Recorded logs as the meter, with graceful overflow. Portkey charges for what it observes, not what it routes. On the free tier, blowing past 10K logs never breaks production traffic — requests keep flowing, they just stop being recorded. That decouples the billing meter from the critical path, the opposite of gateways that hard-throttle at the limit.
2. A published ceiling on self-serve spend. The overage ladder stops at 3M requests, capping the maximum Production bill at roughly $310/month. Most usage-based tools leave overage unbounded; Portkey instead uses the cap as a forcing function into Enterprise, where the real governance features (budgets, rate limits, SSO) live.
3. Same sticker, rebuilt meter. The headline price went $49 → $99 → $49 across three years, but the 2024 restructure cut included usage 10x (1M requests → 100K logs) and raised overage 4.5x ($2 → $9 per 100K). The effective price per request rose substantially while the anchor price “returned” to launch levels — a quiet repricing most buyers would never notice from the sticker.
Strengths & weaknesses
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|
| Genuinely open-source core (MIT, ~12K stars) — free self-host with no request cap | Hosted allotments are small: 100K logs is ~3,300 requests/day |
| Transparent, simple overage: $9 per 100K, hard ceiling ~$310/mo | Effective per-request price rose 10x+ in the 2024 restructure behind an unchanged $49 sticker |
| Free-tier overflow degrades gracefully (requests never blocked) | Governance features (budgets, rate limits, SSO) — the spend-control value prop — are Enterprise-gated |
| Broad coverage: 1,600+ models, 45+ providers, guardrails + prompts included | Short retention (3-day/30-day logs) pushes serious teams to Enterprise |
| Compliance depth at Enterprise (SOC2 Type 2, HIPAA, BAAs, VPC) | Post-acquisition roadmap now tied to Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma AIRS strategy |
Billing UX : Portkey billing controls and transparency
- Billing controls — Self-serve signup and upgrade between Developer and Production (“Start for Free” / “Upgrade Now”); Enterprise via scheduled calls. Virtual keys ship with budgeting support, and Enterprise adds granular budget and rate limits per team or environment — spend governance is itself a product surface.
- Usage visibility — Observability is the product: logs, traces, costs, custom metadata, filters, and alerts (alerts on Production+). The pricing page is unusually explicit about mechanics — the overage rate, the 3M cap, and the fact that free-tier overflow doesn’t block requests are all stated in plain text with a detailed plan-comparison table.
- Payment options — Card-based self-serve for Production; Enterprise is invoiced with custom deployment configurations (SaaS, private cloud, VPC). A startup program and education tier are advertised via dedicated solution pages.
Strategic wins : Why Portkey’s pricing decisions worked
1. Open-source gateway as the wedge, governance as the monetization
The MIT-licensed gateway (~12K stars) made Portkey the default plumbing in thousands of stacks, while the paid tiers monetize what enterprises actually budget for: observability, compliance, and spend governance. By the Series A it managed $500K+ of AI spend daily across 24,000+ organizations. See how AI companies structure pricing.
2. Repricing the meter without touching the sticker
The 2024 shift from “1M requests at $49” to “100K logs at $49 + $9/100K” raised effective unit economics dramatically while keeping the anchor price — and even lowering it from the interim $99. Metering recorded logs (the observability artifact) rather than routed requests also aligned the charge with the value surface. See choosing the right usage metric.
3. Selling governance in a cost-anxiety market
Positioning budget limits, rate limits, RBAC, and cost attribution as the Enterprise tier turned AI cost anxiety itself into the upsell. The Palo Alto Networks acquisition validates the thesis: the gateway is the control point for AI agents, and control points command strategic premiums. Related: outcome-based pricing trends.
Areas to improve : Gaps in Portkey’s pricing approach
1. The silent 10x repricing erodes trust
Buyers who compare today’s $49 against the 2023 $49 are getting one-tenth the included usage at 4.5x the overage rate. Nothing on the page acknowledges the change. Documenting plan-history openly — or grandfathering loudly — would protect the trust the transparent overage table otherwise builds. See bill shock and cost unpredictability.
2. Spend-control features gated behind sales
Portkey’s pitch is governing AI spend, yet budget limits and rate limits sit in the custom-quoted Enterprise tier. A mid-tier with basic budget caps would let the $49 segment practice what the product preaches without a sales cycle.
3. Acquisition-era pricing uncertainty
The standalone pricing page survived the Palo Alto Networks close, but Prisma AIRS integration raises obvious questions: will self-serve tiers persist, will the OSS gateway keep pace, will pricing fold into enterprise security bundles? Buyers signing annual deals deserve an explicit continuity statement.
Key takeaways
- You can reprice without changing the price. Portkey’s $49 sticker survived a 10x cut in included usage and a 4.5x overage increase — the meter, not the price, is where repricing actually happens.
- Meter the artifact, not the transit. Charging for recorded logs rather than routed requests ties billing to the observability value and lets free-tier overflow degrade gracefully instead of breaking production.
- Cap self-serve, then convert. A published $310/month ceiling turns heavy usage into a structured Enterprise conversation rather than unbounded overage resentment.
- Open source the commodity, charge for governance. The MIT gateway is free; observability, compliance, and budget controls are the business — the same playbook as Helicone, Portkey’s closest in-corpus competitor.
- Control planes get acquired. Seed ($3M, 2023) → Series A ($15M, Feb 2026) → strategic acquisition by Palo Alto Networks (May 2026): AI gateways are infrastructure chokepoints, and security platforms will pay for them.
UBP implications
- Included-allotment design is the real pricing lever. Portkey shows that allotment cuts and overage raises move revenue more quietly than headline changes — practitioners should track effective unit price, not sticker price, when benchmarking competitors.
- Pick a meter that fails soft. “Logs recorded” can stop counting without stopping the customer’s traffic; meters on the critical path can’t. That asymmetry matters enormously for developer trust in usage-based products. See usage-based pricing strategy.
- Governance is a monetizable layer on top of usage. When customers fear usage-based cost overruns, the controls that prevent them (budgets, rate limits, attribution) become premium SKUs — Portkey built its Enterprise tier, and ultimately its acquisition value, on exactly that.
Sources
- Portkey pricing page (live capture) (accessed 2026-06-10)
- Portkey AI Gateway on GitHub (MIT) (accessed 2026-06-10)
- Portkey: $15M Series A announcement (accessed 2026-06-10)
- Portkey: $3M seed announcement (accessed 2026-06-10)
- Palo Alto Networks to acquire Portkey (press release) (accessed 2026-06-10)
- Palo Alto Networks completes acquisition of Portkey (accessed 2026-06-10)
- Wayback Machine snapshots: portkey.ai/pricing (accessed 2026-06-10) — snapshots from 2023-11, 2024-05, 2024-09, 2025-01, 2025-12
Bottom line
Portkey is an MIT-open-source AI gateway and LLMOps governance platform that monetizes the hosted control plane: free Developer (10K recorded logs/month), $49 Production (100K logs, then $9 per 100K requests up to a ~$310 self-serve ceiling), and custom Enterprise (10M+ logs, SOC2 Type 2/HIPAA, VPC, budget governance). Its $49 sticker is unchanged since 2023, but a 2024 restructure cut included usage 10x and raised overage 4.5x — repricing by meter, not by price. After a $15M Series A in February 2026, Palo Alto Networks acquired Portkey in May 2026 to power its Prisma AIRS AI-agent security platform. Browse the pricing blueprint for more fully-researched company profiles.
Want to compare Portkey against other AI gateway and LLM observability companies like Helicone, LangSmith, or Langfuse? Browse the pricing blueprint.
Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis
Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.
Same $49 structure under Palo Alto Networks ownership
Current page: Developer free (10K logs, 3-day retention), Production $49/month (100K logs, +$9 per 100K requests up to 3M, 30-day log retention), Enterprise custom (10M+ logs, SOC2/GDPR/HIPAA, VPC). Production metrics retention quietly dropped from 365 to 90 days. Banner announces Palo Alto Networks has completed its acquisition of Portkey.
Enterprise floor unpublished
The $499/month-onwards Enterprise anchor disappears; Enterprise becomes pure 'Custom Pricing'. Developer/Production structure unchanged (10K free logs; $49 + $9/100K overage).
Logs-metered restructure — Production $49 + $9/100K overage
Full restructure: Business becomes Production at $49/month with only 100K recorded logs included, then $9 per additional 100K requests. The meter shifts from requests to recorded logs, included usage drops 10x, and overage rises from $2 to $9 per 100K. Enterprise is listed at $499/month onwards.
Business rises to $99
The launch promo ends: Business is now $99/month (shown against a struck-through $149), still with 1M requests included. Developer stays free at 10K requests.
Launch tiers — Developer free / Business $49 promo
First archived pricing: Developer $0 (10K requests/month, 7-day log retention), Business $49/month shown against a struck-through $99 — 1M requests included, then $2 per 100K additional — and a custom Enterprise tier (SOC 2/GDPR/ISO, PII anonymizer).
- · Portkey's headline paid price is $49/month today — the exact sticker it launched with in 2023 — but the included allotment fell from 1M requests to 100K logs and overage rose from $2 to $9 per 100K along the way.
- · The open-source Portkey AI Gateway is MIT-licensed with roughly 12,000 GitHub stars and routes to 1,600+ language, vision, audio, and image models across 45+ providers.
- · At its February 2026 Series A ($15M, led by Elevation Capital), Portkey said it was processing 500B+ tokens and 120M requests daily and managing $500K+ of AI spend per day across 24,000+ organizations.
Questions & answers
- What is Portkey's pricing model?
- Portkey uses a freemium subscription metered on recorded logs. Developer is free (10,000 logs/month), Production is $49/month with 100,000 logs included plus $9 per additional 100K requests up to 3M, and Enterprise is custom-quoted for 10M+ logs with compliance and private deployment. The open-source gateway is free to self-host under an MIT license.
- Does Portkey offer a free tier?
- Yes. The Developer plan is free forever with 10,000 recorded logs per month, 3-day log retention, the full AI gateway (fallbacks, load balancing, retries), and 3 prompt templates. Exceeding the limit doesn't block your requests — logs beyond 10K simply aren't recorded. You can also self-host the MIT-licensed open-source gateway with no request limit.
- How much does Portkey cost per month?
- Production is $49/month with 100,000 recorded logs included, then $9 per additional 100K requests up to 3 million. That caps the maximum self-serve bill at about $310/month; beyond 3M requests you need a custom-quoted Enterprise contract. Enterprise pricing was listed at $499/month onwards in late 2024 but is no longer published.
- Is Portkey pricing usage-based or subscription?
- It is a hybrid. You pay a flat subscription ($49/month for Production) that includes 100,000 recorded logs, then usage-based overage at $9 per 100K additional requests. At launch in 2023 the paid plan included 1M requests with $2-per-100K overage — the same $49 sticker bought 10x more included usage.
- What happens to Portkey after the Palo Alto Networks acquisition?
- Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Portkey on May 29, 2026, and is integrating the AI gateway into its Prisma AIRS AI security platform as a control plane for AI agents. The public pricing page still shows the standalone Developer/Production/Enterprise tiers, and the MIT-licensed open-source gateway remains available.