What it is
Helicone is a proxy that sits between your app and the LLM provider. You change one line — the API base URL — and Helicone logs every request, response, token count, and cost. No SDK to integrate, no instrumentation in your code. Free up to 10K requests/month; paid plans start at $20/seat/month.
Developer experience
The simplest integration in this category by a wide margin:
const openai = new OpenAI({
baseURL: "https://oai.helicone.ai/v1",
apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
defaultHeaders: { "Helicone-Auth": `Bearer ${process.env.HELICONE_API_KEY}` },
});That's it. You get logs, costs, and basic tracing immediately.
Where it shines
- Setup. Genuinely the fastest "first useful dashboard" of any tool we tested.
- Cost routing and caching. Provider-agnostic cost optimization across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.
- OSS. Self-hosting is a real, supported path.
Where it falls short
- Depth. The proxy sees what's on the wire — request and response. It can't see your reasoning steps, tool calls, or the structure of an agent run unless you also instrument your code, at which point the "no SDK" promise breaks down.
- Single point of failure. Every LLM call now goes through Helicone first. Their cloud goes down, your app goes down. Self-hosting fixes this but moves the ops burden to you.
- Evaluation. Minimal. If you want CI-gated evals or systematic quality scoring, you'll need a second tool.
Bottom line
Helicone is the right choice for the "we just need to see what's happening" phase of an LLM project — and it's a fine permanent home for cost monitoring across many providers. Once your needs shift to multi-step agent debugging or systematic evals, you'll outgrow it. That's not a flaw; it's a design decision, and a defensible one.