LLM observability
INFRO vs Helicone
Helicone is an observability platform for LLM applications — logging, tracing, cost tracking, evaluation, and a gateway — and it is open source, which matters to a lot of teams. If the problem you have is that you cannot see what your AI application is doing, it is a strong and well-regarded answer.
- You want to keep your existing provider relationships exactly as they are and only add visibility on top. That is what Helicone is for, and it does it without changing who you buy from.
- Self-hosting is a requirement. Helicone can run inside your own infrastructure; INFRO is a hosted service and will not pretend otherwise.
- Prompt management and evaluation are the priority. That is a deeper product surface for them than for us.
This section is not a courtesy. If one of these describes you, pick Helicone — a customer who adopts the wrong layer on our advice is worse for us than one we never had.
Where the two actually diverge.
- Observing a bill is not the same as changing it
- An observability layer tells you precisely what you spent. It does not change the number, because you are still buying from the same provider at the same rate. INFRO sits in the purchase path — the per-unit rate is different, and the visibility comes with it rather than instead of it.
- One layer, so the records cannot disagree
- When routing and observability are separate vendors, the router knows where a request went and the proxy knows what it looked like, and reconciling them is your job. Here the request that was routed is the request that was traced, priced, and checked against policy — one record, no seam.
- Media is a first-class case
- Observability tooling in this category is built around tokens. A video render measured in seconds and dollars, delivered asynchronously by webhook, does not fit that shape naturally — and for media-heavy products that is where most of the spend is.
Side by side.
Our column carries dashes too. A comparison where one side is all checks is one nobody believes, and rightly.
| Capability | Helicone | INFRO |
|---|---|---|
| Request logging and traces | yesthe core product | yes |
| Cost tracking | yesof what you already pay | yesand changes the rate |
| Model access and pricing | noyou keep your own | yes |
| Routing and failover | partial | yes |
| Image, video, and audio | partialtoken-shaped | yes |
| Self-hosting | yesopen source | nohosted only |
| Available today | yes | noearly access |
Our reading of each product's public documentation as of August 2026. We do not quote competitors' prices — theirs change and a wrong number about someone else's business is worse than none. Think a row is wrong? Tell us and we will fix it.
Work out what the difference is worth
Price your current model mix at INFRO rates, or have us read your real usage and tell you where we would and would not help.