Providers
Providers
Section titled “Providers”Ptah is multi-provider by design. You configure the AI services you want to use, Ptah routes chat traffic, sub-agent spawns, and tool calls across them, and a single unified cost ledger shows you what each turn cost — no matter which backend served it.
You bring your own keys. Ptah never proxies your traffic through a service we control. Your API keys stay on your machine.
Supported providers
Section titled “Supported providers”| Provider | Auth | Best for | Cost tracking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | API key | Reasoning-heavy work, long contexts, prompt caching. | Anthropic published rates. |
| GitHub Copilot | OAuth | Code completion quality, bundled if you have Copilot. | $0 (your subscription). |
| OpenAI Codex | OAuth / API key | GPT-5 family, high-reasoning modes. | OpenAI published rates. |
| Gemini | API key | Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash — long contexts, vision. | Google published rates. |
| Ollama | Local / token | Offline work, privacy, local models. | $0 for local, Cloud uses Ollama rates. |
| OpenRouter | API key | Access hundreds of models with one key; live pricing feed. | Live from OpenRouter registry. |
| Ptah CLI | User-configured | Wrap any CLI-based agent. Highest priority in CLI detection. | Delegated to wrapped tool. |
And three web search providers for grounding:
- Tavily, Serper, Exa — API keys for web search tools.
How routing works
Section titled “How routing works”- The main chat agent uses the provider and model you pick with the in-chat model selector — or your default from
~/.ptah/settings.json. - Sub-agents spawned by Autopilot use the CLI detection priority (
ptah-cli > gemini > codex > copilot) unless the parent specifies a CLI explicitly. - Web search tools use whichever web search provider you have an API key for, with Tavily as the default.
- Embeddings / indexing tasks use a lightweight model from your active provider family.
See Switching for what happens when you change providers mid-conversation.
Where keys are stored
Section titled “Where keys are stored”Non-secret settings live in ~/.ptah/settings.json. Secrets live in secure storage, managed from the Providers settings page inside the app.
Pro-tier gating
Section titled “Pro-tier gating”A few provider integrations require a Ptah Pro subscription:
- GitHub Copilot OAuth (enterprise SSO support).
- OpenAI Codex OAuth flow.
- OpenRouter with the Ptah-hosted cost registry.
Every provider has a “bring your own key, no subscription required” path — see the individual provider pages.