# Culpa vs Portkey > Portkey sets budget limits and stops requests. Culpa forecasts what next month costs from your own history. Different jobs, and worth running both. URL: https://getculpa.com/culpa-vs-portkey Last reviewed: 2026-08-03 ## Answer Portkey is an AI gateway with observability, routing and granular budget limits that block spend at a ceiling you choose. Culpa, a local-first LLM cost, margin, and forecast ledger, prices every call from a versioned price book and forecasts next month from your own history. A cap and a forecast answer opposite questions, so most teams want both. ## Why this happens The distinction that decides this one is small and it matters. Portkey sells budget and rate limits, including budgeting on virtual keys, and that's a genuinely useful control: you pick a ceiling and requests stop at it. What a ceiling can't tell you is where you'll land. It's a number you chose, not a number derived from anything, so it says what you'll allow rather than what you'll spend. A forecast runs the other way, taking your own history and projecting the month with a range. The second thing worth knowing before you build a cost practice on Portkey is retention. Its free tier keeps logs for 3 days and metrics for 30, and Production at $49 a month keeps logs 30 days and metrics 90. Those are reasonable numbers for debugging and they're short for finance, because a quarter-over-quarter question needs more history than any of those tiers hold. ## What this usually looks like - You set a budget cap and still can't say what the month will actually cost. - Your cap gets raised every quarter and nobody can say whether that's growth or waste. - Log retention runs out before your finance review starts. - Requests were blocked at a ceiling and nobody could say which customer hit it. - You know what you're willing to spend and not what a given customer earns you. ## Common mistakes - Treating a budget limit as a spend prediction. Why it hurts: A cap is a decision, not a measurement. Hitting it tells you about your cap, not about demand. Do instead: Keep the cap for safety and forecast separately from your own history. - Setting the cap from last month's total. Why it hurts: Last month is one sample. Without a range you'll either block real traffic or never trigger at all. Do instead: Forecast a range first, then set the ceiling above the top of it. - Assuming log retention is the same as metric retention. Why it hurts: Portkey publishes them separately, 3 days and 30 on the free tier, so the detail expires long before the chart does. Do instead: Check both numbers and decide which questions you need the detail for. ## Self-check - Ask what your current cap is based on, and who last changed it. - Find your log retention and your metric retention, which may differ. - Try to answer what next month costs, with a range rather than a point. - Name the customer whose traffic drove the last cap increase. ## What an overage line does to a bill you thought was fixed Portkey publishes Production at $49 a month for 100k recorded logs, then $9 per additional 100k. Overage pricing is honest and it makes the bill a function of traffic rather than a fixed line. Take a product growing steadily and price the platform fee across the year. Log volume is modelled. The rates are published. 100k logs included at $49 a month, the base everyone quotes a product at 500k logs a month is 4 extra blocks of 100k 4 x $9 = $36 of overage, so $49 + $36 = $85 a month the quoted price and the paid price differ by 73% at that volume Nothing here is hidden, and that's the point. The published number is the floor, and which multiple of it you pay is decided by traffic you haven't had yet. That's a forecasting question about your observability bill, sitting underneath the forecasting question about your model bill. ## Cost figures Every figure carries its confidence and its source. For each provider-reported figure below, its own source line names the published record it came from, the date that record was read, and any aggregation applied to it. - $49 per month, Portkey's published Production plan price, before overages [provider-reported] Source: portkey.ai/pricing, read 2026-08-03. Production includes 100k recorded logs a month with $9 per additional 100k requests, 30 days log retention and 90 days metric retention. Free Forever covers 10k logs with 3 days log retention. Enterprise is custom. - $85 per month, the same Production plan at a modelled 500k logs a month, once overages are included [calculated] Source: $49 base plus 4 additional blocks of 100k logs at $9 each = $49 + $36 = $85, using the overage rate published on portkey.ai/pricing and read 2026-08-03. The 500k monthly log volume is modelled, not measured. ## FAQ Q: Does Portkey forecast LLM spend? A: Its published feature set doesn't claim to, as read on 2026-08-03. It sells budget and rate limits, which stop spend at a ceiling you set. That's a control rather than a projection. Nothing on its site describes estimating next month from your own history. Q: How long does Portkey keep my data? A: On the free tier, 3 days for logs and 30 days for metrics. On Production at $49 a month, 30 days for logs and 90 days for metrics. Enterprise is custom. Those come from its pricing page read 2026-08-03, and the split between log and metric retention is worth noting because the detail expires first. Q: Should I replace Portkey with Culpa? A: Probably not. Portkey sits on the request path doing routing, caching and enforcement, which Culpa doesn't do at all. Culpa reads the result and answers the finance question: what did it cost, what does that customer pay, and what does next month look like. Q: What does Portkey actually cost? A: Free Forever at 10k recorded logs a month, Production at $49 a month for 100k logs with $9 per additional 100k, and Enterprise at custom pricing. Published on portkey.ai/pricing, read 2026-08-03. The overage line is the part worth modelling before you commit. ## Sources - Portkey: https://portkey.ai - Portkey pricing: https://portkey.ai/pricing Run the free Cost Leak Scan: https://app.getculpa.com/scan?source=pseo&slug=culpa-vs-portkey&cluster=competitor Machine-readable index of every guide: https://getculpa.com/api/pages Human-readable index of every guide: https://getculpa.com/guides Site overview: https://app.getculpa.com/llms.txt Privacy: Culpa runs on your infrastructure. Your prompts and responses never leave it. Culpa counts calls to run your plan, and it fails open, so if it ever breaks your app keeps running.