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Porter Pricing

freemiumopen source · MITlast verified September 6, 2026official site ↗

At a glance

Porter is an open-source Kubernetes-based PaaS (MIT licensed core on GitHub) with a commercial managed control plane. Porter Standard uses metered resource-based billing charged at $6/month per GB of RAM ($0.009/hr) and $13/month per vCPU ($0.019/hr) consumed by running workloads, alongside a free tier/startup credit offering (including 6 months free for eligible startups). Enterprise tiers provide custom volume pricing for large-scale deployments (starting at 40 vCPU / 80 GB RAM baseline) with dedicated support, custom RBAC, SAML SSO, on-prem installation, and custom alerting. Underlying cloud provider infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure compute/EKS) is billed directly by the cloud provider.

Self-hosting cost

Porter is open source under the MIT license. Self-hosting does not add a software license fee, but you still pay for infrastructure, operations, and any external model or API usage. Any hosted, managed, or API plans remain separately priced.

Free & cheaper Self-Hosted Platforms

same category, free plan or open-source license

Ciliumopen sourceFree and 100% open source under the Apache-2.0 license (with dual GPL-2.0/BSD-2-Clause BPF datapath templates) as a CNCF Graduated project. Cilium has no software licensing fees for self-hosted or cloud Kubernetes deployments (including GKE Dataplane V2 and Azure CNI Powered by Cilium); organizations pay only for their compute infrastructure. For mission-critical enterprise environments, Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium (by Cisco) provides quote-based annual subscriptions (per-node/environment) with 24/7 SLA support, hardened LTS builds, Customer Testing Environments (CuTEs), enterprise BGP/EVPN, and advanced multi-cluster security and observability retention.OrbStackFree for personal and non-commercial use, educational studies, and open-source development. Commercial and business use (or individuals generating >$10,000/year) requires a paid Pro license at $8/user/month billed annually ($96/year) or $10/month monthly, covering up to 5 devices per user with priority support and a 30-day trial. Enterprise plans provide custom volume pricing, centralized billing, MDM/SSO directory integration, and 99.9% uptime SLAs.Rayopen sourceRay is a free and open-source distributed computing framework governed by the PyTorch Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. It can be self-hosted on any cloud or on-prem cluster with zero licensing costs, while managed execution is available via cloud providers like Anyscale.Actopen sourceFree and 100% open source under the MIT license. Act has no licensing costs or subscription tiers; it runs locally via Docker and saves billable GitHub Actions runner minutes.
Porter overview →alternatives →

FAQ

How much does Porter cost?

Porter is an open-source Kubernetes-based PaaS (MIT licensed core on GitHub) with a commercial managed control plane. Porter Standard uses metered resource-based billing charged at $6/month per GB of RAM ($0.009/hr) and $13/month per vCPU ($0.019/hr) consumed by running workloads, alongside a free tier/startup credit offering (including 6 months free for eligible startups). Enterprise tiers provide custom volume pricing for large-scale deployments (starting at 40 vCPU / 80 GB RAM baseline) with dedicated support, custom RBAC, SAML SSO, on-prem installation, and custom alerting. Underlying cloud provider infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure compute/EKS) is billed directly by the cloud provider. Paid pricing starts at $6/month per GB.

Does Porter have a free plan?

Yes — Porter has a free plan alongside its paid tiers.

Can you self-host Porter for free?

Porter is open source under the MIT license. Self-hosting does not add a software license fee, but you still pay for infrastructure, operations, and any external model or API usage. Any hosted, managed, or API plans remain separately priced.

What are free or cheaper Porter alternatives?

Cilium, OrbStack, Ray are in the same category with a free plan or open-source license.

pricing is editorial catalog data (last verified September 6, 2026) — vendors change plans; confirm on the official site before you buy. Reuse this data under CC-BY 4.0 via /data.