Tool profile
Orq.ai: cost, fit and limits
Orq.ai is an AI gateway and agent platform made by Orq.AI Holding B.V. in the Netherlands that combines prompt management, evaluators, observability and routing across more than 500 models. It is sold as pay-as-you-go cloud with EU hosting, and as VPC or on-prem deployments for enterprises.
What to know first
Orq.ai puts prompts inside a gateway, so a prompt, the model call and the trace live in one product. Pay-as-you-go starts free, with a published allowance of 100k spans, 5 GB of data and 500 agent runs, and meters beyond that in euros. The pricing page states SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 on every plan. Gateway seats are unlimited, but AI Studio seats are priced.
Orq.ai at a glance
| Maker | Orq.AI Holding B.V., Netherlands |
|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes |
| Entry price | Pay-as-you-go, free start |
| API access | Yes |
| Category | Best AI Prompt Management Software in 2026, rank 3 of 10 |
| Website | orq.ai |
Who Orq.ai is best for
European companies with data-residency rules
The pricing page describes EU SaaS, EU data residency and EU model routing, and the company is Dutch, which simplifies the DPA conversation with a European legal team.
Teams that want one bill for gateway and prompts
Model traffic is billed at provider rates with no markup, plus a 4.5% fee on Orq credits, so the prompt registry does not add a separate subscription.
Companies bringing their own provider keys
BYOK requests are free and unlimited, which suits buyers with negotiated rates at OpenAI, Anthropic or Azure. That removes the gateway markup question for teams with committed spend.
Buyers wanting infrastructure control
Enterprise offers VPC on AWS or Azure marketplaces and an on-prem Helm chart that can be air-gapped, for workloads that cannot touch public SaaS.
Orq.ai plans and pricing
| Plan | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Pay-as-you-go | Start free | 100k spans and 5 GB of data a month, 500 agent runs, 10 AI Studio seats, 30-day retention. Overage: EUR 7 per 100k spans, EUR 3 per GB, EUR 35 per extra seat. |
| Teams add-on | EUR 300 per month | Add-on, not standalone. Adds enterprise SSO (Okta, Microsoft, SAML or OIDC), SSO enforcement, fine-grained RBAC and a dedicated Slack channel. |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom volumes, retention, rate limits and seats, plus audit logs, AI governance, VPC or on-prem deployment, SOC 2 report, custom DPA, uptime SLA and forward deployed engineers. |
Checked November 2026.
What Orq.ai does
- Prompt management and deployments
- Prompt management, deployments and evaluators sit on every plan, per the pricing page. The home page gives no detail on editing flows, so ask for a demo of versioning and rollback.
- Gateway with routing controls
- One OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API reaches 500+ models from 30+ providers, with a Smart Router, fallbacks, retries, load balancing, caching and a batch API. Gateway seats are unlimited on every plan.
- Spend and safety controls
- Budgets and spend limits, guardrails and PII redaction are listed on every plan, along with zero data retention routing for providers that support it. These controls sit in the same product as the prompts.
- Observability on OpenTelemetry
- Traces, cost tracking and OpenTelemetry support are included. The free allowance counts spans, and processed data over 5 GB is billed per gigabyte. Traces feed the same dashboards as cost data.
- Managed agents and tooling
- Managed Agents, an MCP Gateway, a Skills Gateway, Python and Node SDKs, a CLI, Terraform and webhooks round out the developer surface. Terraform support suits infrastructure-as-code teams.
How Orq.ai handles your data
Orq.ai calls itself EU-built and EU-hosted, with EU data residency and EU model routing, and lists SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification on every plan plus GDPR with a standard DPA. HIPAA BAA and the SOC 2 report are Enterprise items. Its privacy policy says service data is kept for the customer relationship plus up to three years, and says information is processed in the EEA, yet it also mentions storage on US servers, so ask which region holds production data. The policy does not address training on customer content.
Where Orq.ai falls short in practice
- Thin prompt documentation on the surface. The home page names Prompt Management only as a menu item. Buyers who choose Orq.ai for prompts must verify versioning, labels and rollback in a trial, not on the page.
- Free tier retention is 30 days. Pay-as-you-go keeps data for 30 days and limits the API to 100 requests a minute. Before billing details are added, requests are rate-limited to 50 per day.
- SSO costs extra. Enterprise SSO and RBAC come through the EUR 300 monthly Teams add-on, so a ten-person team with an identity-provider rule pays more than the headline.
- Conflicting storage statements. The privacy policy says data is processed in the EEA and also names US servers. Procurement should settle which applies in the DPA instead of assuming EU-only.
Works with
Alternatives to Orq.ai
Orq.ai: common questions
Where does Orq.ai keep my data?
The pricing page describes EU SaaS with EU data residency, and lists SaaS, VPC and on-prem as other options. The privacy policy says information is processed in the EEA but also that data sits on US servers. Get the production region written into the DPA.
How is Orq.ai priced beyond the free allowance?
Pay-as-you-go includes 100k spans, 5 GB and 500 agent runs a month. After that spans cost EUR 7 per 100k, processed data EUR 3 per GB and tool-using agent runs EUR 0.01 each. Extra AI Studio seats are EUR 35 per month, and model traffic passes through at provider rates.
Does Orq.ai add a markup on model calls?
The pricing page says model traffic is billed at provider rates with no markup, and a 4.5% fee applies to Orq credits. Requests made with your own keys (BYOK) are free and unlimited, so the fee mainly hits teams that buy model usage through Orq.
Is Orq.ai certified?
The page states SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification on every plan and GDPR compliance with a standard DPA. The home page says ISO 27001 is in progress, so the two pages disagree. The SOC 2 report itself and a HIPAA BAA are listed with Enterprise.
Can Orq.ai run inside my own cloud?
Enterprise offers VPC deployment on AWS or Azure through their marketplaces, and an on-prem option using a single Helm chart that can be air-gapped. Self-hosting is not offered on pay-as-you-go. Prices for these deployments are custom and not published. Startup, academic and NGO discounts are available through support.