#2 in Model Hosting & InferenceUpdated 2026-08

Helicone

by Helicone · AI gateway and LLM observability for routing, debugging and analysing apps

72.5 — BenchRank score out of 100

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Pricing page

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Overview

Helicone is an AI gateway and LLM observability platform. Applications point the OpenAI SDK at its gateway endpoint and switch between 100+ models from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Together AI and AWS Bedrock by changing the model name. The dashboard covers requests, sessions, users, prompts, datasets, a playground, alerts and rate limits.

Best for: AI engineering teams routing, debugging and monitoring LLM calls across many providers
Pricing: Free Hobby tier, then $79/month for Pro and $799/month for Team, both with usage-based charges on top, and Enterprise on contact sales.
Runs on: WebSelf-hosted

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

One OpenAI-compatible endpoint reaches 100+ models
Free Hobby tier with 10,000 requests and 1 GB storage
Gateway adds caching, rate limits and automatic fallbacks
Described as open-source in its own comparison table

Trade-offs

Pro and Team add usage-based charges on top of the flat monthly fee
Free tier keeps data 7 days and caps ingestion at 10 logs/min
SOC-2 and HIPAA only from the $799/month Team plan
Site announces Helicone joining Mintlify, so ownership is changing

Pricing

Published plans from Helicone’s own pricing page, in USD. Usage charges and add-ons may apply on top.

Helicone pricing tiers, monthly rates in USD
Plan	Monthly	Includes
Hobby	—per organisation	10,000 free requests a month 1 GB storage, 7-day retention 1 seat, 1 organisation Community support via GitHub and Discord
Pro	$79per month	Unlimited seats, 1 organisation Alerts, reports and HQL query language 1-month retention, 1,000 logs/min ingestion Usage-based charges above 10K requests and 1 GB
Team	$799per month	5 organisations, unlimited seats SOC-2 Type II and HIPAA compliance 3-month retention, 15,000 logs/min ingestion Private Slack channel and SLAs
Enterprise	Contact sales	Custom MSA and SAML SSO On-prem deployment Unlimited retention, 30,000 logs/min ingestion Bulk cloud discounts

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

MCP support: 60 out of 100
API quality: 55 out of 100
Documentation: 100 out of 100
Agent friendliness: 68 out of 100
Pricing transparency: 100 out of 100
Changelog: 55 out of 100
Marketing site structure: 85 out of 100
Operational trust: 55 out of 100

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

Openness: 85 out of 100
Maintenance: 100 out of 100

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