What changed at Portkey
- Ownership. Palo Alto Networks announced it had closed the acquisition of Portkey on 29 May 2026.
- The product. Portkey's pricing page now reads "Portkey is now PRISMA AIRS AI Gateway, generally available for all enterprises".
- The plans. A free Developer plan (10,000 recorded logs a month, 3-day log retention, marked not suitable for production), Production at $49 a month (100,000 logs, 30-day retention, $9 per extra 100,000), and custom Enterprise.
- The open-source gateway stays MIT licensed. Logging, observability and prompt management are in the hosted app, not the open-source gateway.
An acquisition by a strong company is not a problem by itself. The question is whether the product's direction (now plainly security) is yours, and whether the controls you rely on sit in the tier you buy.
Stay, or move?
| If your priority is | Then |
|---|---|
| Runtime AI security: inspecting what models receive and return | Stay. That is the product's centre now |
| You already standardize on Palo Alto Networks | Stay. One vendor, one procurement cycle |
| A self-hosted gateway with no agreement | Portkey's open-source gateway, LiteLLM or Bifrost |
| A free hosted gateway on a platform you use | Cloudflare AI Gateway |
| Prompt management and evaluation | Langfuse |
| Budgets and cost per customer on your own provider accounts | A BYOK control plane such as INFRO |
The alternatives, side by side
Each option is described from its own pricing page and documentation, checked on the date at the top. INFRO is listed first because this is INFRO's site; its limits are listed as plainly as everyone else's.
What each costs at your volume
Portkey's hosted plan is metered by logs, which for a gateway means requests; INFRO's plans are metered by requests too. At the same request volumes, monthly billing:
| Requests a month | Portkey Production | INFRO |
|---|---|---|
| 100,000 | $49 ($49 + 0 × $9) | $35 (Developer) |
| 500,000 | $85 ($49 + 4 × $9) | $79 (Startup) |
| 2,000,000 | $220 ($49 + 19 × $9) | $199 (Team) |
At these volumes INFRO's plan costs less than Portkey's hosted plan. Portkey costs less in two cases: its free Developer plan (10,000 logs a month, not for production), and its MIT-licensed gateway, which costs nothing to license if you run it yourself. Choose on what the plan includes (log retention, budgets that refuse before the call, cost per customer, failover on your own keys), not on price alone. The INFRO vs Portkey comparison works through the difference.
Which one to choose
- Stay on Portkey
- if AI security is your requirement, or you are standardizing on Palo Alto Networks.
- INFRO
- if you need budgets that refuse before the call, cost per customer and failover across your own provider accounts, on a flat plan.
- Portkey's open-source gateway
- if you liked Portkey's routing and will run it yourself, without the hosted logs.
- LiteLLM or Bifrost
- if you want a self-hosted gateway with budgets and can operate it in the request path.
- Cloudflare AI Gateway
- if your traffic already runs through Cloudflare and a free core gateway is enough.
- Langfuse
- if you used Portkey mostly for logs, prompts and evaluation; pair it with a gateway if you need routing.
How to evaluate the move
- List what you use: routing configs, virtual keys, budgets, guardrails, prompt templates, logs. Each maps to a different destination.
- Check your contract: your renewal date, and what the Enterprise tier would cost for the controls you need.
- Export logs and prompts to storage you control before changing anything.
- Pilot with real traffic: one service behind a flag for a week; compare errors, latency and cost per request. The Portkey migration guide maps each object.
Questions
- Who owns Portkey now?
- Palo Alto Networks. It announced the completed acquisition on 29 May 2026, and Portkey's pricing page says the product is now Prisma AIRS AI Gateway.
- Is Portkey's gateway still open source?
- Yes. The gateway on GitHub is MIT licensed. Logging, observability and prompt management are part of the hosted app, not the open-source gateway.
- What is the closest self-hosted alternative to Portkey?
- Portkey's own open-source gateway is the lowest-change option. LiteLLM and Bifrost add budgets on virtual keys; all three put a service you operate in the request path.