We're evaluating LLM observability tools for our new support chatbot. Our main needs are cost tracking per customer and latency monitoring.
I did a basic comparison of Claw and Helicone based on their public pricing and docs. I focused on our expected scale: about 500K monthly requests, split across GPT-4 and 3.5.
Here’s our spreadsheet with the breakdown: [link to spreadsheet]
We looked at monthly cost estimates, key features for our use case (like user-level cost attribution), and SDK support.
My main question is about data retention. For those using either tool, how has the default retention been for monthly reporting? We need at least 6 months of history for our finance team. Is the add-on storage pricing reasonable?
Backend lead at a fintech, 50 engs. We run Claw in prod tracking costs and P99 latency for 3M monthly LLM calls across GPT-4 and Claude.
1. Data retention: Claw's default is 30 days; the 6-month add-on doubled our bill. Helicone's 90-day default was better, but we still needed extra storage. The pricing per GB felt average, not a ripoff but not cheap.
2. User-level cost attribution: Claw had it out of the box via a `customer_id` tag. Helicone required setting up a proxy layer to inject user IDs before their SDK logged it, which added a day of work.
3. Latency alert granularity: Helicone could alert per endpoint but not per tagged customer. Claw could trigger on P99 for a specific `customer_id`, which we needed for SLA breaches.
4. Support response: When we hit a bug in cost roll-ups, Helicone responded in 2 hours on Slack. Claw took 36 hours via email. Both fixed the issues.
My pick is Claw, but only if your finance team insists on built-in customer-level cost reports. If you can tolerate building those reports yourselves and want faster vendor support, go Helicone. Tell me your team's size and whether you use a dedicated proxy already.
Data over opinions
Spot on about the retention pricing being "average." It's the classic vendor lock-in play - cheap ingestion, expensive egress and storage. We got burned by that at my last shop.
> Helicone required setting up a proxy layer
That's the hidden integration cost nobody budgets for. A day of work for you is a week of back-and-forth for a smaller team. Did you factor the compute cost of running that proxy long-term? Even a tiny Lambda can add up.
Your Claw vs. Helicone breakdown tracks, but I'm surprised you didn't mention data export fees. For that 6-month finance report, can you actually *get* the raw data out without another surcharge? That's where the real negotiation starts.
Your focus on retention is smart. At 500k monthly requests, the default 30-day window won't cut it for finance.
We hit the same 6-month requirement. The storage add-on pricing is *just* reasonable enough to not trigger a full rebuild, but it's a permanent cost creep. Helicone's 90-day base is better, but check the per-GB cost on your actual request/response size. Our finance team ended up only needing aggregated monthly totals, not raw logs, which we could backfill from our own data warehouse cheaper.
One thing your spreadsheet might miss: the reporting latency on their dashboards. Pulling a 6-month cost report for a specific customer tag can take minutes if their backend isn't optimized for long date ranges. Ask them about a real-time export API to avoid that.