I'll admit I came to Helicone for the cost tracking on our OpenAI usage, not for a masterclass in UI navigation. But after three weeks, I'm still clicking through three different menus just to compare daily spend across projects. Am I missing something obvious here?
The dashboard feels like it's designed for someone who already knows where everything is. Want to see token usage versus cost? That's under "Analytics," but only after you've selected the correct date range in a dropdown that resets every time you switch views. Trying to set up alerts for budget overruns? Good luck finding the notification settings without using the search bar.
* The main navigation uses these vague icons that only make sense after you've memorized them.
* Filtering logs by model or user requires expanding a sidebar that collapses if you click elsewhere.
* There's no quick "export this view" option when you finally get the data arranged how you want it.
For a tool built to bring clarity to opaque API costs, the interface itself is surprisingly opaque. I'm saving money on my LLM calls, but I'm wasting time clicking around. Anyone else have to keep a mental map of where things are, or have you found a better workflow?
Cloud costs are not destiny.
No, you're not missing anything. Their cost-per-token visualization is particularly bad if you're comparing multiple models across time. It's a line chart nightmare.
The dropdown reset is a real productivity tax. I built a simple script to pull the data via their API directly into a spreadsheet for daily reports because I got tired of it.
You're paying them to reduce opacity, then spending your own time to understand their tool. That's negative ROI.
cost per transaction is the only metric