PDFAITools
Helicone
LLM observability platform for logging, monitoring, and debugging AI application calls with cost tracking and analytics.
What is Helicone?
What is Helicone?
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability platform that proxies your AI API calls to provide logging, monitoring, cost tracking, and analytics — all without changing your application logic. It supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, and other providers through a single proxy URL.
How Helicone Works
By routing API calls through Helicone's proxy (or using their async logging SDK), every request is captured, stored, and made available for analysis. Teams get a real-time dashboard showing request volumes, costs, latency distributions, and error rates across their entire LLM infrastructure.
- Proxy-based or SDK-based integration options
- Cost tracking with per-user and per-feature breakdowns
- Rate limiting and caching to reduce costs
- User feedback collection and quality scoring
Key Features
Route API calls through Helicone with a single URL change — no SDK required.
Monitor LLM spend by user, feature, or custom property in real time.
Cache identical requests to reduce API costs and improve response times.
Set per-user rate limits to prevent abuse and control costs.
Visualize latency, error rates, and usage trends with an interactive dashboard.
Who Uses Helicone?
Track and limit AI API spend across teams, features, or customers.
Debug failed or unexpected LLM responses by examining the full request log.
Rate limit end users to prevent runaway costs in user-facing AI applications.
Understand how users interact with AI features and where latency bottlenecks occur.
Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- Open-source with self-hosting option
- Minimal integration — just change the base URL
- Response caching can deliver meaningful cost savings
- Supports a wide range of LLM providers
- Clean, well-designed dashboard UI
❌ Cons
- Proxy adds a small amount of latency to requests
- Self-hosting requires infrastructure management
- Evaluation and testing features are limited compared to specialized tools
- Advanced features require paid tiers
Helicone Pricing
Free
- 10,000 requests/mo
- 1-month retention
- Basic analytics
- Community support
Pro
- Unlimited requests
- 3-month retention
- Caching & rate limits
- Email support
Enterprise
- Self-hosted option
- Custom retention
- SSO
- Dedicated support
Helicone earns a 4.4/5 rating from our editorial team. Its generous free tier lets you explore core features before upgrading, making it a low-risk choice for individuals and teams. Standout strengths include open-source with self-hosting option and minimal integration — just change the base url.
Get Started with Helicone →