AI Gateway is designed to prevent bill shock and reduce costs. It provides budget caps ($5,000/month usage budget), spending alerts, and intelligent routing to cheaper models that maximizes your budget. Primary use case: agencies and builders who need predictable pricing and per-client tracking.
Helicone is designed for monitoring and debugging. It logs every request/response, tracks latency, provides detailed analytics, and helps you understand user behavior. Primary use case: product teams debugging LLM features and optimizing prompt performance.
| Feature | AI Gateway | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Budget caps & kill switches | ✓ Built-in | ✕ |
| Intelligent routing | ✓ | ✕ |
| Usage budget included | ✓ $5,000/month | ✕ Pay OpenAI separately |
| Per-client tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Request/response logging | Basic (last 100) | ✓ Unlimited |
| Advanced analytics | Basic dashboard | ✓ Comprehensive |
| Latency tracking | Per request | ✓ Detailed P50/P95/P99 |
| User session tracking | ✕ | ✓ |
| Prompt caching | ✕ | ✓ |
| Automatic failover | ✓ | ✕ |
Includes $5,000 usage budget. Intelligent routing to cheaper models means your budget goes further. Budget caps prevent bill shock—total monthly cost is predictable and known upfront.
Pro plan is $50-70/month depending on request volume. Does NOT include tokens—you pay OpenAI/Anthropic separately. Helicone charges for the observability platform, not the tokens.
AI Gateway: $99/month with $5,000 usage budget and intelligent routing
Helicone: $60/month + you pay OpenAI/Anthropic separately (unlimited billing)
AI Gateway provides budget protection and automatic cost savings through intelligent routing. Helicone doesn't include budget caps—if your app goes viral overnight, you're on the hook for the provider's full bill.
✓ Your #1 priority is preventing bill shock
✓ You need hard spending caps and budget alerts
✓ You want predictable, all-in pricing
✓ You're an agency needing per-client billing
✓ You want intelligent routing to reduce costs
✓ Your #1 priority is observability and debugging
✓ You need detailed request/response logs
✓ You want latency analytics (P50/P95/P99)
✓ You need user session tracking
✓ You have separate budget management already
Yes! Many teams use AI Gateway for routing + cost control, then forward logs to Helicone for observability. Route requests through AI Gateway (gets you failover, budget caps, intelligent routing), and use Helicone's SDK to log request metadata. This gives you the best of both worlds: cost protection + detailed analytics.
Total cost: $99 (AI Gateway) + $60 (Helicone) = $159/month for comprehensive cost + observability coverage. Worth it for teams running production LLM features at scale.
Try AI Gateway Free →