Observability and gateway

RouterPlex vs Helicone.Telemetry versus a wallet.

Helicone leads with LLM observability and adds a gateway (caching, routing, request controls). Official plans checked 18 Aug 2026: Hobby is $0 with 10,000 requests, 1 GB, and 1 seat; Pro is $79/month; Team is $799/month. RouterPlex is not an observability suite. It is a prepaid wallet for official models — list price, $0 top-up, stop at zero.

Observability-first versus access-first gateways →All RouterPlex comparisons →

At a glance

The jobs, side by side.

Figures are taken from official vendor pages and dated 18 Aug 2026. Verify before you move production traffic.

Ledger / comparisonSourced 18 Aug 2026
RouterPlexHelicone
Primary productPrepaid multi-vendor accessObservability, plus a gateway
Model access includedIncluded — one prepaid balanceTypically your providers or their gateway
Published plansPAYG from $5; optional +25% plansHobby $0 · Pro $79/mo · Team $799/mo
Hobby / free unitNone10k requests, 1 GB, 1 seat (official)
Traces, HQL, datasetsNot our productThe reason to buy Helicone
Wallet / top-up fee$0.00 on card and cryptoNot a credit-wallet product
Balance can go negativeNever — requests stop at $0Your provider bills still apply
Hard per-key budgetsHard lifetime cap on every keyRate limits and product controls

Helicone figures from helicone.ai/pricing, checked 18 Aug 2026. Paid plans add usage-based overages for extra requests and storage; use their calculator for a workload estimate.

01 — Job

Helicone answers what happened. We answer how you pay.

If the pain is traces, cost attribution, prompt diffs, caching hit rates, or session replay, Helicone is the product. The gateway is there to make that telemetry complete.

If the pain is opening Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google accounts and then leaking a key, RouterPlex is the product. We will not pretend our dashboard is Helicone.

02 — Price

Seats and requests versus a $5 balance.

Hobby is a real free tier for a single developer at 10k requests. Pro at $79/month and Team at $799/month are observability SaaS prices. They sit on top of whatever you already pay model vendors.

RouterPlex pricing is the tokens plus optional bonus-credit plans. No $79 seat to see a trace we do not store.

03 — Gateway

Their gateway is a lens. Ours is the merchant.

Helicone can proxy existing OpenAI calls (oai.helicone.ai) or run as ai-gateway.helicone.ai. In the common setup you still own the provider relationship.

RouterPlex is the merchant for the catalog. Caching and fallback depth are not Helicone-class. Spend ceilings are.

04 — Fit

Stack them when both jobs exist.

Production apps that already call models should evaluate Helicone on telemetry. Indie agents that need a capped Claude key should evaluate RouterPlex on billing. Using both is coherent: Helicone sees the request, RouterPlex funds a subset of models.

The verdict

Pick the one that fits the job.

These are different products. Choose the job you actually need, not the logo that showed up first in a search.

Choose RouterPlexFit
  • You need to buy model access, not instrument an existing one
  • A prepaid $5 key with a hard budget is the first milestone
  • You do not need Hobby/Pro/Team observability tiers
  • Official Claude, GPT, and Gemini on one bill is the gap
Choose Helicone ifAlso right
  • The primary pain is production visibility — traces, cost, cache, errors
  • You already have provider keys and want a lens in front of them
  • Hobby, Pro, or Team matches how you staff the app
  • A prepaid multi-vendor wallet is a separate purchase

Switching

Migration is two lines.

If you only used Helicone as an OpenAI-compatible gateway, point the client at RouterPlex and use catalog model ids. If you used Helicone for traces, keep it — changing the wallet does not replace observability.

before / afteropenai sdk
# before
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://ai-gateway.helicone.ai/v1", api_key=HELICONE_API_KEY)

# after
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.routerplex.com/v1", api_key=ROUTERPLEX_API_KEY)

Full setup guides for Claude Code, Cursor and other tools are in the documentation.

Questions

Fair questions. Straight answers.

01Is RouterPlex a Helicone alternative?+

Not for observability. Helicone is how you inspect LLM traffic. RouterPlex is how you buy a prepaid multi-vendor key. Replace Helicone only if you were using it solely as a model router and do not need the traces.

02What does Helicone cost?+

helicone.ai/pricing (18 Aug 2026): Hobby $0 (10k requests, 1 GB, 1 seat), Pro $79/month, Team $799/month, plus usage overages on paid plans. Model-vendor invoices are separate in the usual BYOK setup.

03Does RouterPlex have a free tier like Helicone Hobby?+

No. RouterPlex top-ups start at $5. Helicone Hobby is the better zero-dollar way to log 10k requests against keys you already have.

04Can I send RouterPlex traffic through Helicone?+

Only if you have a reason to wrap the call. Most teams pick one path per request. Do not double-bill yourself for a demo.

Also compare

Same format, other products.

All comparisons
Prepaid multi-model wallet
RouterPlex vs OpenRouter

Same vendor list prices. $0 top-up versus 5.5% by card. Balance never goes negative.

Inference platform
RouterPlex vs Fireworks AI

Fireworks runs the GPUs. RouterPlex is a prepaid multi-vendor wallet — not a faster Fireworks.

Inference platform
RouterPlex vs Together AI

Together is an AI cloud. RouterPlex is a prepaid wallet for official vendors — not a Together clone.

Inference platform
RouterPlex vs Groq

Groq wins on LPU latency. RouterPlex wins on official multi-vendor prepaid access. Not the same race.

Start routing

Buy the tokens. Keep Helicone for traces.

Vendor list prices, $0 top-up fee, hard per-key budgets. Top up from $5.

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