Helicone is an open-source LLM observability and monitoring platform that allows developers to log, monitor, and debug their large language model applications with a single line of code. It provides features such as request logging, cost tracking, prompt management, caching, and rate limiting for AI applications built on top of providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. Helicone is designed to help teams gain visibility into their AI usage, optimize performance, and reduce costs in production environments.
Founded
2023
Company Size
1-10 employees
Headquarters
San Francisco, USA
Funding
Seed
Logs LLM requests and responses through a single-line integration, giving teams a searchable record of application activity. Supports debugging and operational visibility across model calls.
Provides centralized observability for LLM applications with metrics, logs, and traces. Helps teams monitor performance, usage, and reliability in production.
Captures traces for agents, chatbots, and other LLM workflows to inspect execution flow and diagnose issues. OpenTelemetry support is mentioned for logs, metrics, and traces.
Tracks key metrics such as latency, cost, quality, and success rate to help teams understand application behavior. These metrics support optimization and monitoring over time.
Shows cost usage across LLM providers and models so teams can control spend. The platform is positioned to help reduce production costs and manage model usage in real time.
Includes prompt management tools for versioning, experimenting, and iterating on prompts using production data. Prompts remain under customer control and accessible in the platform.
Provides a UI playground to rapidly test prompts, sessions, and traces. This supports iterative development and prompt experimentation before or during production use.
Supports automated evaluations on traces or sessions using third-party evaluation platforms. This helps teams assess output quality and compare changes over time.
Acts as an AI gateway/proxy that routes requests to LLM providers and logs traffic. It is described as lightweight and easy to integrate via base URL changes.
Includes caching at the gateway layer to improve efficiency and reduce repeated inference costs. This can help lower latency and spend for repeated requests.
Routes requests to the cheapest available provider and supports automatic fallback when providers fail. This helps optimize cost and improve uptime across multiple model providers.
Helicone is described as fully open source, including its AI gateway and observability tooling. This allows teams to inspect, self-host, and extend the codebase.
Offers fine-tuning workflows through partners such as OpenPipe and Autonomi. This extends the platform into model improvement workflows beyond monitoring.
Provides access to 100+ models through one API key and unified billing. Supports switching among providers such as Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others without changing code.
Supports integration with providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, AWS Bedrock, Ollama, LangChain, LlamaIndex, LiteLLM, and OpenRouter. Integration is often available through a one-line code change or generic gateway.
Supports OpenTelemetry for logs, metrics, and traces, enabling standard observability workflows. This makes it easier to connect Helicone data with existing monitoring stacks.
Can export data to PostHog for custom dashboards and downstream analysis. This supports teams that want to build their own analytics on top of Helicone data.
Supports custom rate limits to control request volume and protect upstream APIs. This is part of the gateway capabilities listed for the platform.
Mentions LLM security and threat detection capabilities in the gateway, including work referenced as Prompt Armor. This suggests protection-oriented controls for AI traffic.
Common questions about Helicone features, pricing, and capabilities
Helicone provides advanced caching mechanisms that store previous LLM responses, preventing redundant API calls and lowering expenses. Additionally, our detailed cost tracking dashboard allows you to identify expensive prompts and optimize your token usage across different models.
Absolutely. Helicone includes a robust prompt management system that lets you create, version, and test prompts. This allows your team to iterate on prompt engineering safely and deploy changes to production without needing to redeploy your entire codebase.
Helicone provides comprehensive request logging that captures the full input, output, and metadata for every call. You can easily filter and search through logs to identify why a specific request failed, analyze latency issues, or debug unexpected model behaviors in real-time.
Helicone is designed for seamless integration, requiring only a single line of code to get started. By simply changing your API base URL to Helicone's proxy, you can immediately begin logging and monitoring your LLM requests without rewriting your core application logic.
Yes, Helicone is an open-source platform, allowing you to host it yourself or use our managed cloud service. This flexibility is ideal for developers who want full control over their observability stack or need to test features in a local environment before moving to production.
Helicone supports a wide range of popular providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and many others via our flexible proxy architecture. If you use a provider that follows standard API patterns, you can likely integrate it with Helicone to gain full observability.
Yes, Helicone integrates smoothly with popular AI frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex. Since we operate at the network level as a proxy, you can simply pass the Helicone headers and base URL into these frameworks to start capturing detailed execution traces.
The Pro plan at $79/month is designed for growing teams needing advanced features like prompt management and longer data retention. The Team plan at $799/month is built for scaling companies that require higher rate limits, priority support, and more collaborative tools for larger organizations.
Yes, we offer a 'Hobby' plan specifically designed to help developers kickstart their AI projects at no cost. It includes essential logging and monitoring features, making it perfect for those in the early stages of development or building personal tools.
Security is a top priority for Helicone. We use industry-standard encryption for data at rest and in transit. For enterprise customers with strict compliance needs, we offer custom packages and the ability to self-host the platform to ensure data never leaves your infrastructure.
Helicone provides tools to help you manage sensitive data, including the ability to mask or redact specific information before it is stored. This ensures that your team can monitor performance and debug issues without compromising user privacy or violating data regulations.
Pro users receive standard email support to help with integration and troubleshooting. Team and Enterprise customers benefit from priority support channels, including dedicated Slack rooms and faster response times to ensure their production environments remain stable.
Kickstart your AI project.
Starting at
$0.00/month
Free plan base subscription
First 10,000 requests included
For 0-10,000 requests
10,000 free requests per month
First 1 GB included
For 0-1 GBs
1 GB free storage
First 1 seat included
For 0-1 seats
1 seat included
For growing teams.
Starting at
$79.00/month
Monthly base subscription
First 10,000 requests included
Usage-based pricing after 10k free requests ($1 per 10k requests based on calculator)
First 1 GB included
Usage-based storage after 1GB free
Unlimited seats
For scaling companies.
Starting at
$799.00/month
Monthly base subscription
First 10,000 requests included
Usage-based pricing after 10k free requests
Custom-built packages.
Contact for pricing
Contact sales for custom MSA and bulk discounts
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