Liquid Inference vs Helicone

Helicone is an observability platform with a gateway. It logs each request, and its gateway sends the request to the cheapest provider that it knows, with your keys or with Helicone credit. Liquid Inference is an exchange. Providers quote their own prices, and each request starts an auction among the offers that meet your rules.

The facts about Helicone come from its own pages, checked on 10 November 2026. The links are in Sources.

Feature by feature

Feature Helicone Liquid Inference
What you buy Logs and a gateway. A plan: free, $79 or $799 a month, or Enterprise Inference. One key and one balance for each provider
Price The provider's price Each provider quotes its own price
Provider choice The cheapest first. Providers at equal cost share the load An auction: the lowest charge plus wait cost wins
Fee The plan. Helicone credit, where open, has no token markup; you pay card fees 5% of the charge, or a floor on cheap models. No plan fee
Cap for each request No. A cost limit for each time window Yes. cap_usd; the provider pays any usage above it
Preview with no charge Partly. A public calculator from token counts that you type Yes. The charge and cap of each offer, and why others are out
Record of each request Partly. A log with a cost that Helicone estimates Yes. A receipt at the rates of the offer
No prompt logs by default No. Kept 7 days to 3 months on public plans Yes. The exchange stores no prompt or answer
Open to sellers No. Helicone adds the providers Yes. By application; sellers post their own offers
API formats Partly. OpenAI formats. Anthropic Messages only through an older proxy Yes. OpenAI Chat Completions and Responses, and Anthropic Messages
Media Partly. Image output for one model Yes. Image, video, speech, transcription and embeddings
Self-host Yes. Under the Apache 2.0 licence No

What the exchange does that Helicone does not

When Helicone is the better choice

Switch in one line

 client = OpenAI(
-    base_url="https://ai-gateway.helicone.ai",
+    base_url="https://router.inference.ai.exchange/v1",
     api_key=...,
 )

Then change each model to a name that GET /v1/models lists. See Connect an app.

Questions

Does the exchange show the cost of each request?

Yes. Each job has a receipt, and the response has an exchange block with the price cap and the charge. See Receipts.

Can the exchange use my own keys?

Yes, in beta. Connect a cloud key, and it competes in the auction. The cloud bills you, and the exchange charges only its fee. See Bring your own key (BYOK).

Sources

Checked on 10 November 2026.