{"id":69629,"title":"Helicone - Open-source observability platform for generative AI","tagline":"Log requests made to OpenAI and track costs, result quality, and latency with one line of code","body":"**TL;DR Instead of building tools to monitor your generative AI product, use Helicone to get instant observability of your requests.**\n\nHey everyone, we are the team behind [Helicone](http://www.helicone.ai/).\n\n**Scott**  brings UX and finance expertise: 4+ years across Tesla, Bain Capital, and DraftKings.\n\n**Justin** brings platform and full-stack expertise: 7+ years across Apple 🍎, Intel, and Sisu Data.\n\nWe’re on a mission to make it extremely straightforward to **observe** and **manage** the use of language models.\n\n## **❌ The Problem**\n\nYou’re using generative AI in your product and your team needs to build internal tools for it:\n\n* You want an **admin mode** to **visualize** outputs, conversations, or prompt chains\n* You don’t know the **unit economics** of your product, like the average cost of a user or conversation\n* Your usage grows and you’re quickly **running into rate limits** with your provider, but your errors are opaque\n* You don’t know **when it’s time to fine-tune** your model and when you would get cost-savings from it\n\n## 🪄 **Our Solution**\n\nHelicone logs your completions and tracks the metadata of your requests. It is an analytics interface for understanding your metrics broken down by users, models, and prompts with visual cards. It caches your completions to save on bills, and helps you overcome rate limits with intelligent retry techniques.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=69629\u0026key=user_uploads/1203799/6118a1c6-83ab-4f6d-a671-6c835bda3698)\n\n## ⚙️ How it works\n\n🎩 **Integrate Helicone with one line of code**\n\nHelicone is a proxy service that executes and logs your requests, secured by Cloudflare workers around the globe to add [less than a scratch](https://docs.helicone.ai/how-it-works/latency) to your overall latency.\n\nPlug Helicone into wherever you are calling OpenAI with a [**single line of code**](https://docs.helicone.ai/quickstart/integrate-in-one-line-of-code) by changing the base URL, and immediately get a visual experience for your requests.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=69629\u0026key=user_uploads/1203799/6230af56-0e40-4c3e-a72c-996b6cc142dd)\n\n🔖 **Customize requests with properties**\n\nAppend custom information like the user, conversation or session id to group requests, then instantly get metrics like the total latency, the users disproportionately driving your OpenAI costs, or the average cost of a user session.\n\n📥 **Setup caching and retries**\n\nEasily cache your completions so that duplicate requests don’t drive up your bill. Customize your cache for your application’s unique requirements. This removes the latency overhead when you’re experimenting to make development faster.\n\nConfigure retry rules when you run into rate limits, or even route your request to another provider when your service is down.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=69629\u0026key=user_uploads/1203799/00d73946-0303-4024-9fc3-da961f05275b)\n\n## Get started **in seconds**\n\n* Try it **for free** at [helicone.ai](http://helicone.ai)\n* Book a call with the team [on our calendly](https://calendly.com/d/4hs-9jb-b96/helicone-intro)\n* Join our [Discord community](http://discord.gg/zsSTcH2qhG)\n* Email the team at [help@helicone.ai](mailto:help@helicone.ai)\n* We’re open source! Check out and support our repository at [github.com/Helicone/helicone](http://github.com/Helicone/helicone) ⭐","slug":"I73-helicone-open-source-observability-platform-for-generative-ai","created_at":"2023-02-23T23:15:47.567Z","updated_at":"2026-06-20T02:03:33.287Z","total_vote_count":52,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/I73-helicone-open-source-observability-platform-for-generative-ai","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":27919,"name":"Helicone","slug":"helicone","url":"https://www.helicone.ai/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/0fd0f837e64cef0930fd804e4345c0342b9a2827.png","batch":"Winter 2023","industry":"B2B","tags":["AIOps","Developer Tools","Analytics","Open Source"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/27919"}}