Portkey
mit-licensed, and billed per log rather than per token
the only gateway here with a complete feature set under a genuinely permissive licence, priced in a unit that decouples your gateway bill from your token spend.
portkey's licence is plain mit, read from the licence file at github.com/portkey-ai/gateway, with no enterprise directory and no carve-out. that puts it in a different position from litellm and bifrost, both of which withhold governance features from their open builds. you can run the whole thing yourself, and enterprise adds private cloud deployment rather than unlocking features.
the billing unit is the interesting part. portkey charges per recorded log — 10,000 a month free, 100,000 on the $49 production tier, $9 per additional 100,000 — and takes no cut of model spend. that means token-heavy workloads never scale the gateway bill: a million input tokens of claude sonnet 4.5 costs $3 to anthropic and nothing extra to portkey. the inverse is also true, and it is the catch. a chatty agent making many small calls burns logs fast, and log-based pricing is harder to forecast than a percentage.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- llm gateways
- pricing
- $49/mo (production)
- website
- portkey.ai
the only gateway here with a complete feature set under a genuinely permissive licence, priced in a unit that decouples your gateway bill from your token spend.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.