Portkey vs Velokey

Portkey

Portkey is a mature way to put one gateway in front of many model providers, with failover, caching and logging included. It suits teams running LLM apps in production that want cost and reliability controls without writing them. The acquisition by a security vendor is likely to steer the roadmap toward enterprise governance, so small teams should watch pricing and packaging.

Pros

• +Open-source MIT-licensed gateway that can be self-hosted
• +Routing, fallbacks, load balancing and semantic caching in one place
• +Free developer tier and a $49 production tier with published overage pricing
• +Observability, guardrails and prompt management on the same platform

Cons

• −The free tier is limited to 10,000 logs and is not meant for production
• −Brand and packaging are shifting under Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS
• −Advanced governance, SSO and VPC hosting need the Enterprise plan

Velokey

Velokey covers more ground than most AI gateways by including image and video models alongside text, priced and metered per unit rather than bundled into a subscription. It reads as a small, possibly one-person operation rather than an established infrastructure company, which matters for anyone routing production traffic through it and depending on uptime.

Pros

• +Covers text, image, and video models in one gateway, not just text
• +OpenAI-compatible API for low-friction integration
• +Transparent per-unit pricing shown directly on the homepage, e.g. per-token, per-image, and per-second rates

Cons

• −No company name, team, or location disclosed beyond a single first name
• −No data-retention policy detail beyond a one-line claim of not storing prompts
• −Near-identical positioning to several other small AI-gateway products makes durability hard to judge

Is Portkey cheaper than Velokey?

Portkey starts at $49/mo. An entry price for Velokey is not confirmed by us yet, so check its pricing page before you compare.

Does Portkey or Velokey have a free tier?

Portkey has a free tier; Velokey has paid plans only.

Which has a public API, Portkey or Velokey?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.