Portkey
Portkey is a hosted gateway for language model requests with logging, prompt management and guardrails, built on an MIT-licensed gateway.
What Portkey does
Portkey sits between an application and the model providers it calls. Requests go to one API, and the gateway applies fallbacks, load balancing, retries, timeouts and caching according to a stored configuration. The hosted product adds logs and traces of each request, provider key management with budgets, prompt templates with versioning, and guardrails that check requests and responses.
The gateway itself is open source under the MIT license and can be run locally or deployed with Docker, Node.js or Cloudflare Workers; for that version the pricing page lists routing, fallbacks, retries, load balancing, guardrails and a basic dashboard. Enterprise customers can run the gateway and data plane in their own cloud while Portkey hosts the control plane.
Portkey's site now presents the product as Prisma AIRS AI Gateway. Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire the company in April 2026, and in July 2026 said the acquisition had closed.
Portkey: owner, license and hosting
| Fact | Value | Source and date checked |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Palo Alto Networks. Its announcement of Prisma AIRS AI Gateway on 16 July 2026 says the Portkey acquisition has closed. | SOURCE ↗ |
| License | MIT for the open-source gateway. The hosted service and the Enterprise gateway are separate, paid products. | SOURCE ↗ |
| Self-hosting | Partly. The open-source gateway can be self-hosted. The full product is self-hosted only as an Enterprise hybrid deployment: gateway and data plane in the customer's cloud, control plane hosted by Portkey. Air-gapped deployment is no longer offered. | SOURCE ↗ |
| Hosted regions | Not stated. The pricing page says the Production plan is not recommended for organizations requiring data residency guarantees. | SOURCE ↗ |
Each value was read from the vendor's own page on the date shown. How listings are checked
Portkey plans and prices
Portkey pricing, checked on . Lowest paid plan: Production, $49 a month. Free tier: Developer: 10k recorded logs per month, kept 3 days for logs and 30 days for metrics. Requests beyond the limit are served but not logged. The vendor says the plan is not suitable for production workloads. Pricing model: A monthly plan fee that includes 100k recorded logs, plus $9 per additional 100k requests, up to 3M requests.
| Plan | Price | Included usage | Beyond that | Data retention | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source | Free to self-host | No limit on requests | – | – | – |
| Developer | Free | 10k recorded logs per month | No overage allowed | 3 days for logs, 30 days for metrics | – |
| Production | $49 a month | 100k recorded logs per month | $9 per additional 100k requests, up to 3M requests | 30 days for logs, 90 days for metrics | – |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | 10 Mn plus recorded logs per month | Custom pricing | Custom retention periods for logs and metrics | – |
The page counts usage as "recorded logs" on the plan cards and as "Requests per Month" in its comparison table. On the Developer plan, "Exceeding this limit doesn't affect your requests; only logs beyond the limit are not recorded." On Production the comparison table gives overage as "$9/Month for Every 100K Up to 3M Requests". The page states no user or seat limit for any plan. The Open Source column is the self-hosted gateway: the page shows no price for it and lists "No Limit" on requests; it has no hosted logs, so no retention applies.
As stated on the vendor's pricing page on . A dash means the page does not say.
Portkey pricing history
The pricing page has been checked daily since . No price change has been recorded since then.
Where Portkey fits
Teams that want request logs, provider key management and prompt templates from the same service that routes their model calls, without running it themselves. The Developer plan records 10k logs a month at no charge, and requests beyond that are still served. The MIT-licensed gateway can be self-hosted for routing alone.
Limits of Portkey
Log retention is 3 days on the free plan and 30 days on Production. The vendor says Production is not recommended where data residency guarantees are required; keeping model data in your own cloud needs the Enterprise hybrid deployment, which has no published price. Fully air-gapped deployment is no longer offered, and the product is now sold under its new owner's name, Prisma AIRS AI Gateway.
Alternatives to Portkey
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LiteLLM
LiteLLM is an open-source Python SDK and self-hosted gateway that calls many language model providers through the OpenAI API format.
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OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a hosted API that routes requests to language models from many providers through one endpoint and one prepaid credit balance.