BYOK control plane
Portkey is a managed AI gateway and control plane. You typically bring provider keys. Official cloud pricing (checked 18 Aug 2026) is log-based: Developer is $0 with 10,000 recorded logs per month; Production is $49/month with 100,000 logs and $9 per extra 100k. RouterPlex does not sell that control plane. We sell prepaid tokens at vendor list price with a $0 top-up fee.
BYOK
Category
$0
Top-up fee
40
Models
At a glance
Figures are taken from official vendor pages and dated 18 Aug 2026. Verify before you move production traffic.
| RouterPlex | Portkey | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | Prepaid tokens across 14 vendors | Gateway + governance, usually BYOK |
| Who pays OpenAI / Anthropic | Included in the RouterPlex balance | You, on your vendor invoices |
| Platform price | $0 top-up + list-price tokens | Developer $0 / 10k logs; Production $49 / 100k logs |
| Overage unit | You load more credit | $9 per extra 100k logs (Production, official) |
| Guardrails, RBAC, prompt catalog | Not our product | The reason to buy Portkey |
| Balance can go negative | Never — requests stop at $0 | Vendor bills are on your accounts |
| Hard per-key budgets | Hard lifetime cap on every key | Org policy and budgets in Portkey |
| Catalog | 40 curated models, 14 providers | Whatever providers you attach |
Portkey figures from portkey.ai/pricing, checked 18 Aug 2026. The free cloud tier is named Developer on that page. Confirm current log limits and overage before you budget.
01 — Category
Buy Portkey when the gateway is an organization control plane: fallbacks, guardrails, RBAC, prompt templates, audit, and a single place to attach many provider accounts.
Buy RouterPlex when you do not want those vendor accounts at all for the models we carry. One prepaid wallet, list-price tokens, $0 to fund it.
02 — Pricing unit
Portkey's published cloud plans are not a token markup table. Developer is free with 10k recorded logs and short retention. Production is $49/month for 100k logs. Extra Production logs are $9 per 100k. Requests can still flow when logs are full — you lose recording, not necessarily the call.
RouterPlex has no log subscription. You pay the vendor list price for tokens and nothing to load credit. Observability is not a Portkey-class product here.
03 — Keys
With Portkey you usually keep OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google relationships. That is a feature if you have committed spend or data-processing addenda on those contracts.
RouterPlex is the opposite: we are the merchant for the catalog. Simpler for an indie or a small team. Wrong if legal requires the call to go on your existing vendor paper.
04 — Fit
A platform team standardizing ten apps should evaluate Portkey on policy, not on whether our $5 top-up is cheaper than $49. A developer who just needs Claude and GPT with a hard budget should not buy a control plane to get a key.
The verdict
These are different products. Choose the job you actually need, not the logo that showed up first in a search.
Switching
Portkey model strings often look like @provider/model. RouterPlex uses plain ids such as claude-opus-4-8. Change the base URL and key, then map each @slug to the catalog.
# before client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.portkey.ai/v1", api_key=PORTKEY_API_KEY) # after client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.routerplex.com/v1", api_key=ROUTERPLEX_API_KEY)
Full setup guides for Claude Code, Cursor and other tools are in the documentation.
Questions
Only if you were using Portkey mainly to reach models. Portkey is a control plane. RouterPlex is a prepaid wallet. Teams that need guardrails and RBAC should stay on Portkey.
On portkey.ai/pricing (18 Aug 2026) Developer is $0 with 10,000 recorded logs per month. Production is $49/month with 100,000 logs and $9 per additional 100k. Enterprise is custom. You still pay model vendors on BYOK.
No. We show usage and key budgets. We do not sell a 100k-log control plane. If traces and policy are the product, Portkey or Helicone is the closer comparison.
Yes. Some teams keep Portkey in front of contracted vendor keys and send overflow or indie workloads to RouterPlex. Do not double-wrap the same call unless you intend to.
Also compare
Same vendor list prices. $0 top-up versus 5.5% by card. Balance never goes negative.
Fireworks runs the GPUs. RouterPlex is a prepaid multi-vendor wallet — not a faster Fireworks.
Together is an AI cloud. RouterPlex is a prepaid wallet for official vendors — not a Together clone.
Groq wins on LPU latency. RouterPlex wins on official multi-vendor prepaid access. Not the same race.
Start routing
Vendor list prices, $0 top-up fee, hard per-key budgets. Top up from $5.