Helicone / AI Gateway & LLM Observability

Overview

Helicone is an AI gateway and LLM observability platform that helps teams route, debug, and analyze their AI applications. It sits between your application and LLM providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Azure, giving you visibility into every request.

The fastest-growing AI companies use Helicone to monitor performance, manage costs, debug issues, and control how their apps interact with language models. The platform combines an API gateway with observability tooling, including caching, rate limits, automatic fallbacks, and a query language for analyzing request data.

Key Benefits

• Integrated with 8+ LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, LiteLLM, Anyscale, Together AI, OpenRouter, and more.
• Tracks and visualizes requests, sessions, users, and custom properties across all LLM calls.
• Reduces latency by caching responses — saved 386 hours for one customer by using cached responses.
• Detects critical bugs automatically, reducing agent runtime by 30% in one documented case.
• Offers flexible pricing with a free Hobby tier (10,000 requests/month) and usage-based plans that scale with your team.
• Open-source with a single-line integration to get started quickly.

How It Works

You add Helicone as a proxy between your application code and your LLM provider with a single-line integration. Every request and response is logged automatically, and you view them in the Helicone dashboard where you filter by sessions, users, custom properties, or write queries using HQL (Helicone Query Language).

You set up rate limits, automatic fallback to alternative providers, and caching rules through the dashboard or API. Alerts and reports notify your team when usage spikes or errors occur.

Use Cases

• AI engineering teams — monitor every LLM call in production to debug failures and track latency across providers.
• Startups building AI-powered products — manage costs with usage-based pricing and caching while scaling from prototype to production.
• Compliance and security officers — enforce HIPAA and SOC-2 compliance through dedicated plans with SAML SSO and on-prem deployment.
• Platform teams at growing companies — route traffic across multiple LLM providers with automatic fallbacks and rate limits for reliability.
• Open-source project maintainers — integrate a free observability layer into their AI applications with the community edition.

Why Choose This Product

Helicone is best suited for teams that need provider flexibility, cost control, and deep observability across their AI stack. It competes with LangSmith by offering broader provider support and open-source availability. Usage-based pricing at scale means costs grow predictably with request volume.