OpenAI-compatible AI Gateway with request logging, observability, and unified provider billing
Helicone documents an AI Gateway at ai-gateway.helicone.ai that lets teams call 100+ models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, and other vendors through an OpenAI-compatible base URL while logging every request to the Helicone dashboard. Official quickstart guides show signing up at helicone.ai, creating API keys in the US control plane, and pointing standard OpenAI SDK clients at the gateway with automatic observability. Helicone states credits carry 0% markup versus provider list prices, support automatic fallbacks when a provider is down, and allow bringing your own provider keys instead of using Helicone-managed credentials.
Use cases
- Prototype multi-vendor LLM apps without signing separate keys for every provider upfront
- Centralize request traces and cost visibility for product teams shipping chat features
- Route production traffic through one gateway while retaining provider-rate economics per Helicone pricing docs
- Compare latency and failure modes across models using logged request history
- Onboard engineers with familiar OpenAI SDK patterns while Helicone captures telemetry automatically
Key features
- OpenAI-compatible AI Gateway base URL documented in docs.helicone.ai quickstart
- Requests tab showing logged completions within seconds of first call
- Unified billing credits across 100+ models listed on helicone.ai/models
- Documented automatic fallbacks when upstream providers are unavailable
- Bring-your-own-provider-keys path on us.helicone.ai/providers for teams needing direct vendor contracts
Who Is It For?
- Full-stack developers who want logging on day one of LLM integration
- Platform leads consolidating API keys and spend dashboards
- Startups evaluating several foundation models before committing to a single vendor
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does Helicone replace my OpenAI or Anthropic account?
- Docs describe Helicone-managed keys via credits or optional BYOK; you choose whether Helicone fronts provider credentials.
- Is there a markup on model usage?
- Helicone's quickstart states 0% markup—you pay what providers charge when using Helicone credits.
- How do I see logged requests?
- After your first gateway call, docs point to the Requests tab at us.helicone.ai/requests.
Related
Related
3 Indexed items
LiteLLM
LiteLLM is an open-source Python library and proxy stack documented at docs.litellm.ai that exposes a single `completion()` interface across providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Vertex AI, Bedrock, and Ollama using OpenAI-compatible request and response shapes. The project documents a Router with retry, fallback, and load-balancing across deployments, optional observability callbacks (Langfuse, MLflow, Helicone, and others listed in observability guides), and a self-hosted LiteLLM Proxy (LLM Gateway) with virtual keys, spend tracking, guardrails, and an admin UI. Recent documentation also describes an MCP Gateway that centralizes MCP tool access with per-key, per-team, and per-organization permissions.
OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a model gateway that exposes many third-party AI models through one OpenAI-compatible API. Teams can compare providers, set routing preferences, and switch models without rewriting core client logic for each vendor SDK. The service publishes per-model pricing and supports pay-as-you-go usage.
Groq Cloud API
GroqCloud exposes hosted language, speech, and compound workloads through Groq’s HTTP APIs. Documentation highlights compatibility with OpenAI client libraries when you point `base_url` at Groq’s OpenAI-compatible endpoint and supply a Groq API key, alongside first-party Groq SDKs for Python and JavaScript. Pricing pages publish per-model token rates (USD) for on-demand inference.