Agent Infrastructure
Helicone
AI gateway that sits between your application and any model provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, open models) and gives you per-user, per-team, and per-API-key spend caps, rate limits, and observability out of the box.
The AIE Angle
Why Helicone made the cut
Helicone is the meter and the circuit breaker on your AI bill. It's an AI gateway you drop in front of every model call your stack makes — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, open models running on your own hardware — and it gives you per-user, per-team, and per-API-key spend caps, rate limits, and observability without writing a line of glue code. The high-leverage move is routing every AI call in your stack through one gateway so you have one place to set policy instead of N vendor dashboards. The recent enterprise stories — the consultant who watched a client spend half a billion dollars on Claude in thirty days because nobody set per-employee caps, Microsoft quietly discontinuing most of its Claude Code licenses in part over cost, Uber burning through its 2026 Claude Code budget in four months — all share the same root cause. Usage-based pricing on autonomous agents behaves like a metered utility with no governor. Helicone is the governor. Right pick when you have more than one model in production and need a single control plane. Wrong pick when you have a single use case on a single provider with a hard contractual cap already in place.
Independently tested. No pay-to-play.
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5 Ways To Use It
Helicone for business
- 1
Set per-user and per-team spend caps across every model your stack calls so a runaway agent can't drain the AI budget.
- 2
Route every AI call in your application through one gateway and one set of policies instead of N vendor dashboards.
- 3
Get per-request cost, latency, and token observability across Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and open models in a single view.
- 4
Run A/B prompt and model experiments in production and measure cost and quality on the same dashboard.
- 5
Cache repeated requests at the gateway to cut spend on identical or near-identical prompts.
Common Questions
Helicone FAQ
The questions business professionals most often ask about Helicone.
What does Helicone actually do?+
Helicone is an AI gateway and observability layer. You change your model provider base URL to Helicone's gateway, keep the same SDKs, and Helicone proxies every call — capturing cost, latency, tokens, and metadata while enforcing the spend caps and rate limits you set. One control plane in front of every model provider.
Which model providers does Helicone work with?+
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Groq, Together, Anyscale, OpenRouter, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — including open models you host yourself. The point is one gateway in front of everything, not a wrapper for one vendor.
How does Helicone help control AI costs?+
You set spend caps per user, per team, per API key, or per organization, and Helicone enforces them at the gateway — the request returns an error before the model is called instead of after the meter runs. It also surfaces cost-per-trace so you can find the prompts and users driving the bill.
Is Helicone open source?+
Yes. Helicone is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and offers a self-hosted deployment alongside its managed cloud service. If your traces contain customer data your legal team won't ship to a SaaS vendor, you can run the whole gateway inside your own infrastructure.
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