Helicone

Helicone is an observability platform for LLM applications functioning as an intermediary gateway between your code and LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, etc.). Rather than embedding instrumentation code in every call, Helicone intercepts and automatically records every request, response, latency, and cost without application code changes. Its intuitive dashboard offers request tracking, segmentation by user, usage analytics, prompt management with integrated playground, and alerts/rate-limiting to monitor application health. Helicone also functions as an intelligent router: the platform can dispatch requests across multiple LLM providers per rules (latency, cost) and automatically failover to a fallback model on outage. The Hobby tier (free, 10k requests/month) is honest for prototyping; Pro ($79/month, unlimited users, reporting) suits small startups; Team ($799/month, SOC2/HIPAA, five organizations, dedicated Slack) for larger teams.

Helicone does not provide a French-language interface and remains English-language. Founded by Y Combinator alumni, the platform offers discounts for startups (50% first year), nonprofits, open-source, and students/teachers. The API enables deep programmatic integration and the Gateway model makes the platform agnostic to the LLM stack used. The learning curve is very low thanks to the passive approach (proxy gateway) requiring no existing code modifications, just request routing changes. The main tradeoff is latency added by the gateway (usually low, a few ms) and the absence of LLM-as-judge evaluations like some competitors: Helicone focuses on observability and routing rather than quality evaluation.