Helicone is the category leader in engineer-grade LLM observability. Tokmeter is built for the finance and procurement conversation. They pair well — most teams end up running both.
Install with a read-only billing key. No SDK. Hand a chargeback PDF to finance the same day.
Best-in-class per-request traces, playgrounds, and evals — the right pick when engineers need to debug prompts and outputs.
Updated June 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.
| Capability | Tokmeter | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
Built for engineering teams | ||
Built for finance / procurement / CFO | engineer-first UX | |
Install without engineers (billing-key only) | 1-line SDK / proxy header |
| Capability | Tokmeter | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
Chargeback PDF/CSV by team, cost center, GL code | user-level usage | |
Budget approvals with email sign-off | ||
Hard $ caps per org / team / virtual key / model | rate limits, not $ | |
IDE seats (Cursor, Copilot) alongside API spend | ||
Anonymized industry benchmarks (Spend Index) | ||
Outcome KPIs (cost per PR, ticket, seat) |
| Capability | Tokmeter | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
Single-request trace (prompt, response, tokens, $, latency) | category leader | |
Prompt playground & experiments | ||
Custom properties / user IDs / session IDs | via x-tokmeter-* headers | |
Per-user / per-session cost rollups | ||
Evals & scoring |
| Capability | Tokmeter | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
Automatic fallback / retry across providers | via proxy mode | |
Sliding-window RPM/TPM rate limits | ||
Caching | ||
PII / secret redaction guardrails |
| Capability | Tokmeter | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
Provider billing-API ingest (Azure, Bedrock, Vertex) | proxy-only model | |
Manual CSV upload for non-API spend | ||
IDE-tool seat ingest (Cursor, Copilot) |
| Capability | Tokmeter | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
Free tier | 1 provider, full dashboards | 10k requests/mo |
Paid plans start at | $49/mo Starter | $20/mo Pro |
Pay per request above quota | flat tiers |