PORTKEY → STAX

Portkey is going enterprise. Stax stays focused on the team.

On April 30, 2026, Palo Alto Networks announced the acquisition of Portkey. Existing customers will keep being supported — but the roadmap is now bending toward enterprise security and Prisma AIRS integration. Small teams just stopped being the priority.

Stax tracks what Portkey never could — your Cursor seats, Claude Pro, ChatGPT Team — at $49/mo flat with no overage. Portkey's "Production" plan looks flat at the same $49 but bills $9 per additional 100K requests. That's not flat. That's a counter that ticks up.

Verified 2026-05-13 · portkey.ai/pricing · paloaltonetworks.com/company/press/2026/...

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Why Stax

Three reasons to leave the gateway and own the bill.

01 · Acquisition signals exit

Portkey is now Palo Alto's AI security play.

Post-close (Q4 FY26), Portkey integrates into Prisma AIRS — Palo Alto's enterprise AI security platform. Subscription tracking, finance UX, and SMB-friendly pricing won't be on that roadmap. Stax is building the opposite.

02 · "Production" isn't flat

$49 + $9 per 100K is a counter.

Portkey Production is $49/mo for 100K requests, then $9 per additional 100K — capped at 3M before you get bumped to Enterprise (custom). A team scaling mid-year sees a surprise bill. Stax is $49 flat, no counter, no caps.

03 · Subscription blind spot

The gateway can't see what isn't an API call.

Portkey is proxy-mode — it sees traffic that goes through it. Cursor seats, Claude Pro accounts, ChatGPT Team licenses don't go through any gateway. They're invisible to Portkey by design. For a 10-person team, that's often the bigger half of the bill.

FEATURE COMPARISON

Stax vs Portkey, side by side

Feature Portkey Stax
Active SMB roadmap ✗ Acquisition pivots toward enterprise security (Q4 FY26) ✓ Built for 2–50 person teams, shipping weekly
Subscription tracking (Cursor, Claude Pro, ChatGPT Team) ✗ Never existed — proxy-only, no API = no data ✓ Built-in for 8 vendors
Production plan pricing $49/mo for 100K requests + $9 per 100K overage, capped at 3M $49/mo flat · no requests counter
UX persona ML engineer / platform team (gateway, guardrails, governance) Founder / CFO / ops lead (one number, plain English)
Setup Drop-in proxy (rewrite SDK base URL to Portkey endpoint) Paste an API key per provider · or upload a CSV
Email alerts on spend thresholds ✓ Production tier ($49/mo + overage) ✓ On every plan
Open source / self-hostable ✓ Gateway is Apache 2.0, 11.7K stars ✗ Hosted only
FAQ

Migrating from Portkey — the questions you're asking.

Will Portkey actually go away?
Probably not — Palo Alto Networks confirmed continued support for existing customers post-acquisition. But the product trajectory bends. Portkey was building for AI engineers; Prisma AIRS is built for enterprise security teams. Same product, different roadmap priorities. If you're a 10-person team paying $49 for cost visibility, you're not the customer the new owners are optimizing for.
I was running Portkey for the gateway. Stax doesn't have one — how does this work?
Stax skips the proxy entirely. You paste an API key for each provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, GitHub Copilot are live) and we pull usage directly from each vendor's admin/billing API. No SDK rewrite, no latency added to your hot path, no traffic routed through us. The trade-off: we don't sit in the request path, so we don't do gateway things — caching, fallback routing, guardrails. If you need those, Portkey or LiteLLM are still the answer. If you wanted a gateway primarily for cost visibility, Stax does that part directly.
What about ChatGPT Team, Claude Pro, Perplexity Pro — those don't have admin APIs.
Add them as tracked subscriptions from Settings. You enter vendor, plan, seats, amount; Stax rolls them into your monthly total alongside live API spend. Claude Pro at $20/seat × 8 seats lands next to your $1,200 OpenAI bill in the same dashboard. Portkey's gateway architecture made this physically impossible. Stax's "pull from billing APIs + manual subs" model lives natively in the same surface.
Portkey Production is $49 too. Why is "no overage" a real difference?
Run the math at scale. A team doing 200K requests/mo on Portkey Production pays $49 + $9 = $58. At 1M requests, it's $49 + $81 = $130. At 3M, you've maxed Production and get bumped to Enterprise (custom quote). On Stax, all three numbers are $49. The CFO who buys flat doesn't want a "well, this month was $130 because we shipped a feature" conversation in May.
Portkey is open source. Stax isn't. Why?
Honest answer: Stax is a 1-person SaaS at $49/mo and supporting self-hosters at that price wouldn't work. Portkey's gateway is Apache 2.0 — if you specifically need to self-host, that option still exists (regardless of the acquisition). Stax is the trade you make when you'd rather pay someone else to keep it running and add the next 8 vendors.
Is there a migration discount?
Yes — early-access pricing is $29/mo locked for the first 100 accounts, regardless of where you came from. Mention "Portkey" in the signup notes if you want to flag yourself as a migrator, but it's not gate-checked.

Switch from Portkey to Stax. $29/mo locked for early access.

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