Helicone alternative
A Helicone alternative that's still being built
Tokenwise keeps the part of Helicone you liked — the one-line proxy — and adds the part it never had: a weekly email that tells you exactly what to change to cut your bill.
Where Helicone is in 2026
Helicone was acquired by Mintlify in March 2026 and is now in maintenance mode. It’s stable and open-source, but it has stopped shipping — which means it can’t track new models, add providers, or improve the maker workflow. That’s the gap a living alternative fills.
Helicone got a lot right: a one-line proxy, a clean dashboard, a generous free tier. If you’re reading this, you probably used it and are now looking for something that’s still moving.
Tokenwise is built for the same person — a solo maker or small team spending $50–2000/mo on LLM APIs — and keeps the same baseURL-swap setup. The difference is intent: Helicone shows you what you spent; Tokenwise tells you what to do about it and proves the savings. This is a fair comparison, not a takedown — here’s where each one fits.
Helicone vs Tokenwise, feature by feature
| Tokenwise | Helicone | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | One line — swap your baseURL | One line — swap your baseURL |
| Roadmap status | Shipping weekly | Maintenance mode (Mintlify acquisition) |
| Provider coverage | 8 providers, pricing kept current | Frozen at acquisition |
| Tells you what to change | Weekly email + apply-able recommendations | Dashboards you interpret yourself |
| Proves the savings | Verified against your own traffic | No |
| Edge actions | Semantic cache, fallback, model overrides, A/B | Caching + rate limiting |
| Pricing | $19 Indie / $79 Pro | Free, then $79 Pro |
| Open-source / self-host | Cloud only | Open-source (Apache 2.0) |
Switching is a baseURL swap
Because both tools are proxies, you don’t rewrite anything — you change the host and the auth header. Full step-by-step on the Helicone migration page.
Before — Helicone
const openai = new OpenAI({
baseURL: "https://oai.helicone.ai/v1",
defaultHeaders: {
"Helicone-Auth": "Bearer sk-helicone-...",
},
});After — Tokenwise
const openai = new OpenAI({
baseURL: "https://proxy.tokenwisehq.com/openai/v1",
defaultHeaders: {
"X-Tokenwise-Key": "tw_...",
},
});When Helicone is still the right call
- You need to self-host.Helicone is open-source (Apache 2.0); Tokenwise is cloud-only. If owning the deployment is a hard requirement, that’s a real point in Helicone’s favor.
- You only want raw logging.If you don’t want recommendations or an edge that changes behavior and just need a request log, Helicone’s free tier is fine.
- Otherwise, if you want a tool that keeps up with pricing and tells you what to cut, Tokenwise is the actively-shipping successor with the same setup.
Frequently asked
Is Tokenwise a drop-in Helicone replacement?
For the proxy workflow, yes — both are a one-line baseURL swap, so moving over is changing a URL and a header. Tokenwise adds the weekly action email and apply-able cost recommendations that Helicone doesn't have.
Why not just stay on Helicone?
If it covers your needs, you can. The risk is that maintenance mode means no new models, providers, or features — so as LLM pricing keeps changing, the tool falls further behind. Tokenwise's whole job is to keep pace with that.
How is Tokenwise cheaper?
Indie is $19/mo for 200k requests with alerts, versus Helicone's jump from free to a $79 Pro tier. Pro is $79 for 2M requests. Limits are enforced at the owner level across all your workspaces.
Does Tokenwise support more than OpenAI?
Yes — OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, xAI/Grok, Google Gemini, Groq, DeepSeek, and Mistral, with same-shape fallback across OpenAI-compatible chains.
It’s a one-line change
Point your baseURL at Tokenwise, keep your keys and your code, and get a weekly email with the changes that cut your bill — proven on your own traffic before we recommend them.