HELICONE → STAX

Helicone is in maintenance mode. ~16,000 teams need somewhere to go.

On March 3, 2026 Helicone was acquired by Mintlify and stopped active development. No new features. No new integrations. No roadmap. Just security patches until further notice.

Stax tracks what Helicone never could — your Cursor seats, Claude Pro, ChatGPT Team, Perplexity Pro, GitHub Copilot, plus the API spend Helicone did see — for $49/mo flat. One dashboard, one number.

Verified 2026-05-13 · helicone.ai/blog/joining-mintlify

Migrate from Helicone → See full comparison
Why Stax

Three reasons every displaced Helicone team should land on Stax.

01 · The dead-product window

Helicone is done. Mintlify said so.

The acquisition post said the team is "joining Mintlify" and the cloud product enters maintenance mode "for the foreseeable future." New model support and security fixes only. No new features. No new integrations. No roadmap.

02 · The subscription blind spot

Token tracking misses your real AI bill.

For a 10-person team running Cursor seats, Claude Pro accounts, and a couple of ChatGPT Team licenses, the subscription spend alone is often $300–500/mo that Helicone never saw. Stax pulls it all in.

03 · No usage math

$49 flat, no overage counters.

Helicone Pro was $79/mo plus per-request fees above 10K. Your CFO doesn't want a counter — they want a single line on the corporate card. Stax is one number, every month, regardless of volume.

FEATURE COMPARISON

Stax vs Helicone, side by side

Feature Helicone Stax
Active development / roadmap ✗ Maintenance mode since Mar 2026 ✓ Shipping weekly
Subscription tracking (Cursor, Claude Pro, ChatGPT Team) ✗ Never existed — proxy-only ✓ Built-in for 8 vendors
Pricing model Pro $79/mo + usage above 10K req. Team $799/mo. $49/mo flat · Team $99 flat
UX persona Engineer-first (debugging, traces, HQL queries) Finance-first (one number, plain English)
Setup Drop-in proxy (rewrite SDK base URL) Paste an API key per provider · or upload a CSV
Spend alerts via email ~ On Pro tier ($79/mo) ✓ On every plan
Open source / self-hostable ✓ Apache 2.0, 5.4K GitHub stars ✗ Hosted only
FAQ

Migrating from Helicone — the questions you're asking.

Can Stax import my Helicone data?
Not directly — Helicone's data export goes to CSV, and Stax can ingest those CSVs through the manual upload flow. Email [email protected] if you've got a Helicone export sitting around and we'll help you map columns once. New API spend coming in after migration tracks live via the standard Stax provider keys.
I was using the Helicone proxy. How does Stax see my API spend without one?
Stax skips the proxy entirely. You paste an API key for each provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, GitHub Copilot are live) and we pull usage directly from each vendor's admin/billing API. No SDK rewrite. No latency in your hot path. The trade-off: we don't see prompt-level traces. If you need request-by-request debugging, Stax isn't the right tool — Langfuse is closer to that. If you want the bill, Stax is built for it.
What about ChatGPT Team, Claude Pro, Perplexity — those don't have admin APIs.
Add them as tracked subscriptions from Settings. You enter the vendor, plan name, seat count, and amount; Stax rolls them into your monthly total alongside live API data. Claude Pro at $20/seat × 8 seats shows up next to your $1,200 OpenAI bill in the same dashboard. Helicone never had this surface.
Helicone Pro was $79/mo with my startup discount — that's actually cheaper than Stax for me.
With the 50% off year-1 startup discount, yes — Helicone Pro was effectively $39.50/mo. That discount stops mattering when the product stops shipping. Past March 2026 you're paying for a frozen product instead of $49/mo for one that gets the next 8 vendors live, alerts, team management, data export, and a roadmap.
Helicone was open source. Stax isn't. Why?
Honest answer: because we're a 1-person SaaS at $49/mo and supporting self-hosters at that price wouldn't work. If you specifically need self-hosted, Helicone is still on GitHub and Apache 2.0 — you can run it yourself. If you'd rather have someone else handle the hosting and the new-vendor work and the keep-it-running cost, that's the trade you're making with Stax.
What if Mintlify revives Helicone?
Possible. The acquisition language was "foreseeable future" maintenance mode — soft enough to leave the door open. If they do, the 8 vendors of subscription tracking, the flat pricing, and the finance-first UX are still gaps Helicone didn't have before and won't have on day one of revival. Stax is built around the bill, not the API call. That doesn't change.
Is there a migration discount?
Yes — early-access pricing is $29/mo locked for the first 100 accounts, regardless of where you came from. Mention "Helicone" in the signup notes if you want, but it's not gate-checked.

Move from Helicone to Stax. $29/mo locked for early access.

Get early access → See full comparison