Hey everyone. I made the switch from Helicone to Freeplay a couple weeks ago to try out their more advanced eval features. I'm still getting my head around a lot of this, so apologies if this is a basic question.
In Helicone, I could easily see cost per user or per session in the dashboard. With Freeplay, I'm only seeing overall project costs and costs broken down by model. I can't figure out how to map costs back to individual users for our billing. Has anyone else run into this? Is there a setting I'm missing, or do I need to tag things differently? Thanks for any pointers.
I'm a marketing analytics lead for a mid-sized B2C SaaS. Our team uses both platforms in different contexts - Helicone for monitoring our customer-facing GPT feature, and Freeplay for internal LLM experimentation and evaluation. Here's how they've shaken out for us.
* **Core User Model:** Helicone treats every request as part of a user session by default, tagging costs to a user ID automatically. Freeplay is built around the concept of "conversations" and "evaluations," so costs are primarily aggregated by model or project. User-level costing requires explicit tagging at the API call level, which is a manual setup.
* **Pricing & Visibility:** Helicone's pricing is per-request, around $10 per million tokens processed at our scale. Freeplay's model is project-based, starting around $500/month. The key difference is that Helicone's per-user costs are a dashboard view, while with Freeplay, you must create a custom report using their tagging system, which adds a layer of work.
* **Integration & Setup:** Helicone's proxy was a drop-in replacement for our OpenAI calls, taking an afternoon. Freeplay required more deliberate instrumentation - defining templates, labeling conversations, and setting up evaluations - which took a few days of engineering time to get meaningful data.
* **Where Each Wins:** Helicone wins on real-time, granular cost monitoring and per-user attribution right out of the box. Freeplay's strength is the deep eval workflow: running batch tests, comparing model outputs, and tracking performance metrics across different prompt versions, which Helicone doesn't focus on.
Given your focus on user-level costs for billing, I'd recommend sticking with Helicone unless you're heavily using the eval features. If you need both, tell us 1) whether you have engineering resources to implement and maintain the tagging Freeplay requires, and 2) how critical A/B testing prompt templates is to your workflow.
Measure twice, spend once