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Helicone

Helicone is an Apache-2.0 open-source AI gateway and LLM observability platform that logs requests, costs and latency with one line of code, plus prompt experiments and evaluations.

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Introduction

Helicone is an AI gateway and LLM observability platform for AI engineers. The README describes access to 100+ models with one API key through an OpenAI-compatible gateway with routing and fallbacks, and one-line integration to log requests from OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, Gemini, the Vercel AI SDK and others.

Traces and sessions help debug agents, chatbots and document pipelines, and metrics track cost, latency and quality, with one-line export to PostHog for custom dashboards. A playground lets teams iterate on prompts, sessions and traces, and prompt management versions prompts using production data and deploys them through the gateway without code changes. The README mentions a free tier of 10k requests per month.

Helicone can be self-hosted or used in the cloud. In the quality loop it monitors LLM behaviour and cost in production.

The source code is at Helicone/helicone on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, with about 6,300 stars; the most recent commit was on 28 October 2026.

Features

  1. AI gateway: OpenAI-compatible routing and fallbacks.
  2. Metrics: Cost, latency and quality.
  3. Traces and sessions: Debug multi-step flows.
  4. Prompt management: Versioned prompts deployed via the gateway.
  5. Playground: Iterate on prompts and traces.
  6. Self-hosting: Simple to self-host.

Pros

  1. Easy start: Proxy-based setup needs minimal code.
  2. Free to use: Open source under the Apache-2.0 licence, so the core tool costs nothing to use.
  3. Actively maintained: The repository had commits as recent as 28 October 2026.
  4. Community: About 6,300 GitHub stars.

Cons

  1. Proxy dependency: Traffic routes through the gateway.
  2. Evaluation depth: Lighter than dedicated eval tools.
  3. Release cadence: Tagged releases are infrequent.
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://ai-gateway.helicone.ai", api_key=HELICONE_API_KEY)

Resources:

Pricing

Helicone is open source under Apache-2.0 and can be self-hosted for free. Helicone Cloud has a free tier of 10k requests per month and paid plans; see helicone.ai for current pricing.

  1. Teams that want quick LLM cost and latency visibility.

Conclusion

Helicone is one of the fastest ways to see what your LLM traffic costs and how it behaves.

Add a dedicated evaluation tool for deeper quality checks.

On CheckOps, Helicone is filed under the Production monitoring & observability stage. Related tools listed here include Langfuse, Laminar, OpenLLMetry, AgentOps, Arize Phoenix and Opik. Before standardising on one, compare recent maintenance activity, the pricing model as your usage grows, and the integrations you rely on today. Information on this page was verified against the official website, documentation and repository on 11 November 2026.

Alternatives

Other tools on CheckOps that cover similar ground. Open a page, or compare one with Helicone side by side.