Yes, Portkey has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes 10k recorded logs per month, 3 days retention for logs and 30 days for metrics, and Prompt Management with 3 prompt templates, playground, API endpoints, versioning, and variables.
About
Portkey is an AI gateway and LLM operations platform that sits between applications and model providers. It provides a unified API for routing requests, managing keys, applying retries and fallbacks, and collecting observability data such as logs, traces, feedback, metadata, and filters.
The free plan includes 10k recorded logs per month, 3 days of log retention, 30 days of metrics retention, 3 prompt templates, simple caching, deterministic guardrails, and community support. It is aimed at developers evaluating the platform or prototyping non-production AI workloads, while paid plans add higher log limits, longer retention, guardrails, RBAC, SSO, and enterprise deployment options.
- 10k recorded logs per month
- 3-day log retention
- 30-day metrics retention
- 3 prompt templates
- Unified AI gateway API
- Logs, traces, feedback, metadata
- Simple caching and guardrails
- Community support
Free Tier Value
This free tier is a capped but genuinely usable monthly plan: it includes 10k recorded logs, basic retention, gateway, observability, prompt management, caching, guardrails, and community support. The cheapest paid plan is $49/month, and the free tier keeps roughly a fifth of that plan’s log volume plus most core features, so a fair buyer-style estimate is about $5/month. A credit card is not called out for signup, and the offer is free forever but still limited by usage and retention.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- 10k recorded logs per month.
- 3 days retention for logs and 30 days for metrics.
- AI Gateway with universal API, fallbacks, load balancing, retries, and more.
- Observability with logs, traces, feedback, custom metadata, and filters.
- Prompt Management with 3 prompt templates, playground, API endpoints, versioning, and variables.
- Simple caching.
- Deterministic guardrails.
- Community support.
See Portkey pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Production
- recorded logs per month
- 100k
- log retention
- 30 days
- metric retention
- 90 days
- prompt templates
- unlimited
- 100k recorded logs per month
- 30 days retention for logs, 90 days for metrics
- AI Gateway with universal API, fallbacks, load balancing, retries
- Observability with logs, traces, feedback, metadata, filters, alerts
- Guardrails
- Unlimited prompt templates
- Security features including RBAC and service account API keys
- Production support
Enterprise
- recorded logs per month
- 10M+
- retention
- custom
- deployment
- private cloud / VPC
- support
- dedicated onboarding
- 10M+ recorded logs per month
- Custom retention periods for logs and metrics
- Custom guardrail hooks and advanced evaluation templates
- Role-based access control, SSO, granular budget and rate limits
- Private cloud deployment and VPC hosting
- Data export to data lakes and advanced compliance
- Dedicated onboarding and priority support
- Full feature set with enterprise support
Pricing extracted from Portkey's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Portkey free forever?
Yes. Portkey has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
Does Portkey require a credit card?
No. You can start on Portkey's free tier without entering card details.
What happens when you exceed Portkey's free tier?
You move to a paid plan. Portkey's cheapest paid plan is Production at $49 / month.
What is Portkey's free tier worth?
Portkey's free tier is worth about $5.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 54/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
