What Helicone does
Helicone is an open-source LLM observability and routing platform for teams building production language-model applications. The company’s core product is designed to (1) ingest and visualize LLM requests/responses with associated cost and latency, and (2) route LLM calls across many model providers with reliability and cost-control behaviors such as fallbacks and caching.
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Helicone supports two integration modes: an AI Gateway approach (recommended) where Helicone sits in the request path, and an “observability-only” mode where customers bring their own provider API keys while still receiving observability data. Helicone’s routing/gateway concept is exposed through a unified interface intended to reduce the integration burden of managing multiple LLM providers separately. The platform emphasizes tracking operational reliability issues (provider outages, rate limits), debugging complexity (non-deterministic outputs and multi-step workflows), and cost uncertainty—using the observability data to help teams understand what models/providers are costing and failing. Helicone was acquired by Mintlify on March 3, 2026. After the acquisition, Helicone’s services continued in “maintenance mode,” with security updates, bug fixes, and new model support still shipping, while product feature development shifted into Mintlify.