Product / UX / Telemetry & observability

Helicone

LLM proxy that captures logs, costs, and latency with a one-line integration (swap your API base URL). Clean dashboard for monitoring request volumes, token usage, costs, and error rates. Positioned as the lowest-friction entry point for LLM monitoring, no SDK needed, just a proxy URL change. YC W23. Code is open source (Apache-2.0) but primarily used as a cloud service.

Helicone/helicone monorepo active June 2026 (5,477 commits on main). Confirmed live on GitHub; hosted cloud + self-host.

Openness

4 high confidence

4.0

license: Apache-2.0(OSI)
source: public
core-gated: gated

Apache-2.0 OSS core with a hosted commercial cloud (tiered pricing), classic open-core, same shelf as Langfuse/LangWatch (O4).

https://github.com/Helicone/helicone recorded 2026-06-04
Apache-2.0 license; full source; hosted cloud paid tiers + self-host

Adoption

3 low confidence

3.0

No verified request/customer count disclosed (site says 'world's fastest-growing AI companies rely on Helicone' but no numbers); ~5.8k GitHub stars is the only honest signal, so capped at level 3 via stars fallback. Treat as directional.

https://github.com/Helicone/helicone recorded 2026-06-04
~5.8k GitHub stars; no disclosed usage figures
https://www.helicone.ai/ recorded 2026-06-04
no quantitative usage/customer numbers disclosed

Capability

4 high confidence

4.0

Broad feature matrix with a strong gateway/routing + caching angle on top of tracing, prompt mgmt, cost, and datasets; on par with Langfuse C4. Held at 4 (no frontier-definer claim over anchors).

https://github.com/Helicone/helicone recorded 2026-06-04
feature list: observability/agent tracing, prompt mgmt, cost analytics, AI Gateway/routing, datasets/fine-tuning, fallbacks

Unchanged since 2026-07-30 (last edited, not re-checked)