switch guide · updated 2026-10-26

Switch from Portkey to TokenZero in one line

Portkey is an AI gateway with configs, retries, fallbacks and a virtual-key vault. TokenZero is a BYOK savings gateway: you keep retry and fallback semantics (x-tokenzero-fallback: auto retries 429/5xx with jitter and can fail over to a model you name), and every request comes back with a signed receipt for what it saved.

The change

OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://tokenzero.sh/w//v1
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://tokenzero.sh/w/
# provider keys stay in your code exactly as they are; nothing else changes

Create the workspace first:

curl -s -X POST https://tokenzero.sh/v1/signup -d '{}'   # workspace + key, no form
npx -y @tokenzero/cli init                                # or: audits the repo, writes .env

What differs from Portkey

  • No key vault: keys are never stored, so there is nothing to breach.
  • Savings engines are built in and reported on signed receipts; Portkey reports what you spent.
  • Pricing is a share of verified savings, not a per-request fee.

What TokenZero does

  • Bring your own key. Provider keys pass through untouched; TokenZero never holds them.
  • Four engines. Prompt-cache formatting (Anthropic breakpoints, OpenAI prompt_cache_key / 12h retention), exact and semantic response cache, calibrated cascade routing with a shadow-parity breaker, and a signed savings ledger.
  • Measured, not claimed. Gateway overhead and the audit corpus are published on /benchmarks with the scripts that produced them.
  • Free up to $500/month of routed spend; paid plans are a share of verified savings with a 3x-ROI-or-$0 rule.

Verified, not reported

Every request through the gateway gets an Ed25519-signed receipt with list-price baseline, actual provider cost and the difference, chained per workspace (seq, prev_receipt_hash), verifiable offline with npx -y @tokenzero/cli verify --chain.

Questions

Does TokenZero have fallbacks?
Yes: with fallback=auto the gateway retries retryable upstream errors with exponential jitter and, when you supply x-tokenzero-fallback-model and x-tokenzero-fallback-key for a provider with the same request shape, re-issues the request there once. The receipt records that a failover happened.

Is there a migration tool?
No tool is needed: change the base URL (or the /w/<key>/ prefix) and keep your provider keys. Run npx -y @tokenzero/cli audit first to see what the gateway will act on.