What is Helicone?
Helicone is a monitoring and debugging tool for developers building apps on large language models. You route your OpenAI, Anthropic or other model calls through Helicone, usually by changing one line of code, and it records every request with its cost, latency, tokens and response, so you can see what your AI features are actually doing.
From those logs you can group requests into sessions, track usage per user, add custom properties, set alerts and build reports. Prompt management, a playground, datasets and scores help you test and improve prompts. Helicone also works as an AI gateway with caching, rate limits and automatic fallbacks between providers. The project is open source, and larger customers can deploy it on-premises.
Main Features
- Logs every LLM request with cost, latency and tokens
- Sessions and per-user analytics
- Alerts, reports and a query language
- Prompt management, playground and datasets
- AI gateway with caching, rate limits and fallbacks
- Open source with on-premises options
How to Get Started with Helicone
- Create a free account at helicone.ai and get an API key.
- Change your model client's base URL or add the Helicone header.
- Send a few requests from your app.
- Open the dashboard to inspect requests, costs and errors.
Helicone Pricing
The free Hobby plan includes 10,000 requests, 1 GB of storage and 7-day retention. Pro costs $79 a month and Team costs $799 a month, each with usage-based pricing above the included amounts, and Enterprise is custom.
Who Should Use It?
- Developers shipping LLM-powered apps
- Startups tracking AI costs
- Teams debugging prompts in production
- Engineers managing several model providers
- Companies needing on-premises AI logging
Helicone Alternatives
- OpenRouter: One API for hundreds of AI models with usage tracking.
- E2B: Secure cloud sandboxes for running AI-generated code.
- Google AI Studio: Build and test prompts with Gemini models.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Helicone free?
Yes, the Hobby plan is free with 10,000 requests and 1 GB of storage. Pro costs $79 a month.
Is Helicone open source?
Yes. Helicone describes itself as an open-source LLM observability platform.
Which model providers does Helicone support?
It works with major providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and its gateway can fall back between providers automatically.