Helicone Pricing in May 2026

Helicone's pricing follows tiered structure: Free for up to 10K requests/month, Pro at $20/month for 50K requests + advanced features, Enterprise custom-quote. Self-hosted Helicone is genuinely free under Apache 2.0. Real-world Helicone Cloud bills for AI products land at $25-300/month for early-stage; high-volume products hit $1K-5K/month.

The Free Plan offer covers basic LLM observability needs. The strategic decision: Helicone's value is the zero-touch integration model — route your OpenAI/Anthropic API calls through Helicone's proxy and get observability for free without instrumenting code. For broader LLM observability, LangSmith (LangChain) is the most direct alternative for teams using LangChain — integrated tracing, eval, and prompt management. Langfuse is the open-source alternative with similar feature scope to LangSmith but with self-hosting option. Braintrust targets evaluation specifically with strong offline-eval workflows. Portkey targets API gateway plus observability with stronger routing and fallback features. PromptLayer targets prompt management. Arize AI Phoenix and WhyLabs target ML observability more broadly. Weights & Biases added LLM tracing and is common for teams already using W&B. For specifically prompt-engineering platforms, PromptHub, Promptable, and Vellum AI target prompt versioning with deeper workflow integration. For specifically LLM cost optimization (different angle), tools like OpenLLMetry and OpenInference target observability standards. For pure logging without dedicated platform, Datadog, New Relic, and Grafana now include LLM monitoring. For evaluation specifically alongside observability, Braintrust, LangSmith, and Langfuse all include eval. Helicone's particular strength is zero-touch proxy observability for teams not using LangChain.