This post compares the three most common names developers ask us about: aiusage, Helicone, and Portkey. It's written by the aiusage team, but we'll tell you clearly when one of the others is the better pick.
Short version:
- aiusage — the savings layer. Make your existing Claude account ~20× cheaper. BYOK, pay-per-run, no subscription.
- Helicone — the observability layer. Log every prompt/response, track cost per user/feature, monitor latency, debug regressions.
- Portkey — the routing layer. Fall back across providers, load-balance, A/B models, enforce rate limits.
They are genuinely different products. You can use all three together — and some teams do.
aiusage — Savings
Positioning. Your Claude bill, 20× smaller.
Who it's for. Developers and teams already committed to Claude who want the same output for a fraction of the Anthropic invoice. Especially Claude Code users and teams running Anthropic SDK workloads in production.
How it works. You paste your Anthropic key. We encrypt it at rest. You run a one-line installer that points your Claude Code / Anthropic SDK at aiusage.ai instead of api.anthropic.com. Proprietary infrastructure in front of Claude delivers the same output while billing Anthropic roughly 1/20 of what a direct call would cost. You pay us a flat credit-pack fee ($10/15 runs, $25/50, $50/120) instead of paying per-token to Anthropic.
What you get:
- Drop-in Anthropic-compatible endpoint
- Streaming, tool use, vision, PDF, 1M-context models — all supported
- Credit-pack pricing, credits never expire, no subscription
- BYOK — your Anthropic key stays in your account
- Encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), per-user; no prompt logging
- Public changelog, built-in-public velocity
What you don't get:
- Multi-provider routing. We're a Claude-only savings layer. If you need to route across GPT / Gemini / Claude, that's not us — see Portkey.
- Per-prompt logs in a dashboard. We don't log prompts in plaintext. If you want a searchable log of every call, see Helicone.
When aiusage wins. You're on Claude. You're staying on Claude. Your bill is bigger than you want. You'd rather have a small predictable pack fee than an unpredictable Anthropic invoice.
Helicone — Observability
Positioning. Every LLM call, logged, searchable, attributable.
Who it's for. Teams past the toy-project stage who need to know which users cost the most, which features are burning money, why latency spiked yesterday afternoon, and whether the prompt change they shipped on Tuesday regressed output quality.
How it works. You route your provider calls through Helicone's proxy (or use their async logger). Every request and response is persisted. Their dashboard gives you cost breakdowns by user ID, feature, model, session — plus latency, error rates, and prompt-level analytics. Evals, caching, and rate limiting are add-ons.
What you get:
- Deep per-call logging and search
- Cost attribution (per user, per feature, per session)
- Latency and error monitoring
- Prompt versioning and eval tooling
- Multi-provider support
- Generous free tier for small teams; paid tiers scale with volume
What you don't get:
- A cheaper underlying Claude bill. Helicone passes Anthropic pricing through — they add observability, not savings.
- Aggressive cost-reduction infrastructure. Their caching helps with duplicate calls but doesn't restructure Anthropic billing the way aiusage does.
When Helicone wins. You need to know what's happening. Your CFO is asking "why is our AI spend growing faster than our users?" Your product team ships prompt changes weekly and you want to catch regressions. You're a team, not a solo operator, and shared visibility matters.
Portkey — Routing
Positioning. One API, 200+ models, production-grade routing.
Who it's for. Teams that want provider flexibility. You're not committed to a single model family. You want to fall back from GPT-5 to Claude when OpenAI is slow. You want to A/B Gemini against Sonnet on real traffic. You want a guardrail that caps per-user spend.
How it works. Portkey acts as a gateway. You call their API with a virtual model name; they route to whichever underlying provider matches based on your config. Features include load balancing, fallback, retries, caching, rate limiting, and a unified logging view across providers.
What you get:
- Unified API across 200+ models
- Fallbacks and retries across providers
- Load balancing and weighted routing (for A/B or canary)
- Rate limiting and budget guardrails
- Observability (overlaps with Helicone territory)
- Enterprise auth, SSO, VPC options on paid tiers
What you don't get:
- Underlying Anthropic cost reduction. Portkey is a routing layer; it bills at provider rates plus their margin.
- A strong opinion about Claude specifically. They're provider-agnostic by design.
When Portkey wins. You're not locked into Claude. You want your stack to fail over cleanly when any one provider wobbles. You want to experiment across providers without rewriting client code. You need per-team or per-key budget caps.
The Actually-Useful Comparison Table
| Dimension | aiusage | Helicone | Portkey |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Cut Claude bill 20× | Log & analyze every call | Route across models |
| Cheapens your Claude invoice? | Yes, ~20× | No (passes through) | No (adds margin) |
| Multi-provider? | Claude only | Yes | Yes (200+) |
| Observability depth | Minimal (by design) | Deep | Moderate |
| Fallback & routing | No | No | Yes |
| Pricing model | Credit packs, $10+ | Free tier → usage | Free tier → usage |
| BYOK | Yes (your key, encrypted) | Yes | Yes |
| Prompt logging | Off by design | On by default | On by default |
| Setup time | ~60 seconds (one-line installer) | 5–15 min | 15–30 min |
| Strongest fit | Claude-only, want lower bill | Team needs visibility | Multi-model routing |
Can You Stack Them?
Yes, and sophisticated teams do. A common pattern:
- Portkey handles routing across providers and falls back between GPT / Claude / Gemini at the edge.
- aiusage sits in front of the Claude branch of that routing — so when Portkey routes to Claude, it actually hits our savings layer.
- Helicone logs everything going through Portkey for observability.
In that stack: Portkey picks which model, aiusage makes the Claude calls cheap, Helicone tells you what happened. Nobody's doing each other's job.
For solo devs and small teams, this is overkill. You probably want one layer, not three.
How To Pick
Answer these three questions honestly:
1. Are you committed to Claude as your primary model?
- Yes → aiusage likely wins on cost.
- No / model-shopping → Portkey.
2. Do you need per-call logs for debugging, cost attribution, or compliance?
- Yes → Helicone is hard to beat.
- No → skip it, add later if needed.
3. Is your bill the reason you're reading this post?
- Yes → aiusage. That's literally the product.
- No → the other two may be more relevant.
A Word On Trust
All three products are BYOK. All three ask you to hand them a provider key or credentials. That's a real trust decision.
- aiusage encrypts keys at rest with AES-256-GCM, per-user, never logs raw prompts, applies PII scrubbing server-side. If you want to delete your key, one click in the dashboard. Full transparency on mechanism is public.
- Helicone is open-source and self-hostable if you want full control.
- Portkey offers on-prem and VPC deployment for enterprise tiers.
Don't hand a production key to anyone who can't answer "where is my key, how is it encrypted, and what happens to my prompts?" in one sentence.
The Honest Plug
This post is by aiusage, so yes, we think we win on the savings axis. We're not trying to win on observability or routing — those aren't our jobs and we'd rather tell you that clearly than watch you switch in and be disappointed.
If you're on Claude and your bill is bigger than you want it to be, aiusage is ~$10 to try. If it's not for you, you'll know in a day and you can uninstall with one env-var change. No lock-in, credits never expire, and we'll stay out of your way.
If Helicone or Portkey is the right tool for your problem, use them. The worst outcome is you pick the wrong category of tool and blame the whole class.
Drop your Claude bill 20×.
Paste your key at aiusage.ai — takes 60 seconds. BYOK, credit packs from $10, credits never expire.
Get started →Written by the team at aiusage.ai. We do one job: make your existing Claude account ~20× cheaper. Everything else is someone else's fight.