Your team spent 6 months implementing Backstage. Adoption? 8%. The CFO asks: "Why didn't we buy a solution?" Here's the 2025 comparison with real pricing, real timelines, and the counterintuitive truth: commercial platforms are 8-16x cheaper than "free" Backstage for most teams. OpsLevel $39/user/month delivers in 30-45 days. Port $78/month offers flexibility without coding. Cortex $65-69/month enforces standards. We break down the decision framework by team size—under 200? OpsLevel. 200-500? Port or OpsLevel. 500+? Backstage viable with dedicated platform team. The key insight: it's not open-source free vs commercial expensive—it's transparent licensing vs hidden $150K/20-developer engineering costs. In this episode:- Backstage costs $150K per 20 developers in hidden engineering time—$1.5M annually for 200-person teams versus $93K-$187K for commercial platforms (8-16x cheaper)- OpsLevel ($39/user/month) delivers fastest implementation at 30-45 days with 60% efficiency gains and automated catalog maintenance—ideal for teams under 200 engineers- Port ($78/user/month) offers flexible "Blueprints" data model for customization without coding, 3-6 month implementation—best for 200-500 engineer teams needing flexibility Perfect for senior platform engineers, sres, devops engineers with 5+ years experience looking to level up their platform engineering skills. Episode URL: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00024-internal-developer-portals-showdown