BurnLens vs Helicone
An open-source LLM cost tracking alternative · Updated May 2026
TL;DR
Helicone entered maintenance mode in 2025 — new features and integrations are paused. If you are evaluating an LLM observability proxy in 2026, you want a tool that is still being shipped. BurnLens is the closest drop-in alternative: open-source, one-env-var install, and adds two capabilities Helicone never had — hard-cap budget enforcement before the upstream calland local-first storage so prompts never leave your machine.
Feature comparison
| BurnLens | Helicone | |
|---|---|---|
| Actively maintained (2026) | Yes | Maintenance mode |
| Open source license | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 (frozen) |
| Install method | pip install burnlens | Docker / hosted proxy |
| Local-first (prompts never leave machine) | Yes | No — proxies through Helicone Cloud by default |
| Hard-cap budgets (returns 429 before upstream call) | Yes | No — alerts only, post-call |
| Per-customer cost attribution via headers | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-provider | OpenAI, Anthropic, Google (Azure / Bedrock / Groq / Mistral / Together on v0.2 / v0.3 roadmap) | OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure (frozen) |
| Local CLI dashboard, no signup required | Yes | No |
| Free tier | Unlimited self-hosted | 10K requests/mo on hosted |
Why teams migrate from Helicone to BurnLens
1. Hard caps actually stop spend. Helicone alerts you after a runaway loop has already cost $4,000. BurnLens registers a daily dollar limit per API key and returns HTTP 429 before the request is forwarded upstream — your bill literally cannot exceed the cap.
2. Prompts stay on your machine.Helicone's default deployment proxies your traffic through their cloud. BurnLens runs on localhost:8420. The full request body never leaves your infrastructure; only anonymized usage counts sync to the optional cloud dashboard.
3. New providers ship in days, not never. Adding a provider to BurnLens is one new file in burnlens/providers/plus a pricing JSON — Groq, Bedrock, and Azure all shipped this way. Helicone's frozen integration list has not expanded since maintenance mode began.
4. CLI-native workflow. burnlens top shows live spend in your terminal.burnlens report reconciles against your provider invoice. burnlens analyze finds waste — prompt bloat, duplicate calls, over-spec models. None of this requires a web login.
How to migrate from Helicone in 3 commands
pip install burnlens
burnlens start
export OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8420/proxy/openai/v1Your existing OpenAI SDK code now routes through BurnLens. Repeat with ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL for Claude, or use burnlens.patch() for Google AI. See the install guide for full provider coverage.
When Helicone is still the right choice
Helicone's hosted dashboard is more mature for read-only observability across very large teams that already invested in its custom properties API. If you have an existing Helicone deployment that does not need new features, there is no urgency to migrate. For new projects in 2026, BurnLens is the safer bet.