Comparison
FreeModel vs Portkey
Portkey assumes you already have provider keys and want to control what they do. FreeModel assumes you do not, and supplies the capacity itself. That is the fork.
The short answer
Pick Portkey if you bring your own provider accounts and need governance on top: budgets, RBAC, audit logs, guardrails, compliance certifications. It sits between you and providers you already pay.
Pick FreeModel if you do not have provider accounts and want an endpoint that works now, with free capacity first. You get less control and no enterprise governance — but you also do not need keys before you start.
Side by side
| Portkey | FreeModel | |
|---|---|---|
| Where model access comes from | Your own provider keys (BYOK only) | Free capacity from upstream supply, paid fallback |
| Do you need provider accounts first | Yes — for every provider you use | No |
| Core purpose | Governance and observability over spend | Supply — an endpoint that works without setup |
| Free tier | 10K requests/month on the dev plan | Free-first routing by default |
| Paid plans | $49/mo for 100K requests; $9 per additional 100K | — |
| Enterprise governance | RBAC, SSO/SCIM, audit logs, FinOps dashboards | None |
| Compliance certifications | SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA; BAA signing | None published |
| Guardrails | 20+ deterministic and LLM-based checks | None |
| Deployment options | Managed SaaS, hybrid (data plane in your VPC), self-host | Hosted only |
| Anthropic-compatible endpoint | Via the universal API | Yes, alongside OpenAI format |
Portkey's published model coverage figures differ between their own pages, so this table states none. Check their docs directly if the count matters to you.
Where Portkey is the better choice
This is not a close call in several of these cases. If any of them apply, Portkey is the right pick and we are not.
1. You need governance, full stop
Budgets per team, RBAC, SSO with Okta, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, retention policies, FinOps dashboards. FreeModel has none of this and does not pretend to. If you are accountable for how a department spends on models, you need a layer that can answer "who spent what, and who approved it" — we cannot.
2. Compliance certifications are a hard requirement
SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, BAA signing. If your procurement process requires these, the evaluation ends here. We publish nothing of the sort.
3. You need the data plane inside your own VPC
Portkey's hybrid deployment runs the gateway and data plane in your environment while they manage the control plane — sensitive prompts never leave. FreeModel is hosted only. There is no configuration that changes this.
4. You want guardrails and observability built in
20+ guardrail checks, OpenTelemetry, 21+ metric dashboards. If you are running production traffic against models and need to see and constrain it, that toolkit exists in Portkey and does not in ours.
5. You already have provider accounts
If you are already paying OpenAI, Anthropic and Google directly, Portkey adds control without changing who you buy from. Switching to us would mean giving up direct billing for no governance gain.
Where FreeModel is the better choice
1. You do not have provider keys yet
This is the main one. Portkey is BYOK only — before it does anything for you, you need an account and a payment method at every provider you want to reach. FreeModel works without any of that.
2. Free capacity is the point, not governance
If what you actually need is "run this without paying yet", a governance layer does not help — it governs keys you do not have. FreeModel routes to free capacity first and falls through when it is gone.
3. You are one person, not a procurement process
Portkey's own positioning targets teams with compliance requirements. For a solo developer or a small project, the governance surface is overhead you will configure once and never look at again.
4. You want the agent layer, not the gateway layer
FreeModel sits under Aiglade, which ships four agent clients preset with task dispatch and an approval step. If you are orchestrating agents rather than governing API spend, that is the product you want.
Switching in either direction
From Portkey to FreeModel
base_url https://freemodel.online/v1 (OpenAI format)
https://freemodel.online/api/gateway (Anthropic format)
You can stop supplying provider keys — that is the change.
Budget configs, guardrails and audit hooks have no equivalent here;
if you relied on them, migrate those decisions into your own code first.From FreeModel to Portkey
1 Get provider keys — Portkey is BYOK only, one per provider you use
2 Add them in Portkey's dashboard or config
3 Point your client at Portkey's gateway URL
4 Recreate any budget or routing policy you had here as Portkey config
Note the billing change: after this, you pay providers directly.Last updated 2026-09-20. Portkey's pricing and features verified against their published docs on this date — their own pages report different model counts, so verify anything specific before relying on it.