Helicone logs the bill. Promptibus reduces it.
Helicone is a popular LLM observability platform — proxy your OpenAI/Anthropic calls through them, get logs, cost dashboards, A/B testing, alerting. They run at the post-call layer (what happened, how much did it cost). Promptibus MCP runs at the pre-call layer: pick the cheapest model, rewrite to correct syntax, lint for failed-gen prevention. Same goal (reduce LLM spend), different stages.
Helicone tracks and analyzes your LLM spend after the fact. Promptibus reduces it before the call runs. Use both — pre-flight to save, post-flight to verify.
| Feature | Promptibus | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Stage | Pre-call (engineering) | Post-call (observability) |
| Primary integration | MCP tool calls in your agent | HTTP proxy for OpenAI/Anthropic SDKs |
| Cost reduction mechanism | Cost-aware routing + prompt optimization + lint | Caching + analytics surface |
| Multi-modal | Image / video / audio / text / code | Mostly text (LLMs) |
| Caching | Client-side 24h cache for static tools | Full request/response cache with TTL |
| Self-hostable | No (managed service) | Yes (open source + self-host option) |
| Free tier | 100 calls/day | Free dev plan; paid for production volume |
These complement each other. Use Promptibus to make each call cheaper and correct; route those calls through Helicone for logs + analytics. Stack them.
Free tier: 100 calls/day. No credit card.