Why I Built a Self-Hosted Alternative to Helicone (and What I Learned)

Cover image: I've spent 13 years as an SAP integration consultant. In the past 18 months, almost every project I touch has an LLM layer somewhere: summarizing documents, routing requests, generating structured outputs from unstructured data. The models work. The infrastructure around them doesn't. The problem isn't the models. It's that once you deploy an LLM-powered feature, you go blind. You don't know: Which model is actually being called in production How much each feature is costing per day