Cloudflare Developer Platform vs Helicone
Workers, Pages, D1, R2, KV — edge-native serverless
vs. Open-source LLM observability — 1-line integration via proxy
Pricing tiers
Cloudflare Developer Platform
Free
Workers: 100k req/day, 10ms CPU/req. D1: 5M reads/day. KV: 100k reads/day. R2: 10 GB/mo. Durable Objects: 100k req/day.
Free
Workers Paid
$5/month minimum. 10M Workers req/mo + overages. Generous D1, KV, R2 allowances. All services unlocked.
$5/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Higher SLAs, dedicated support, account managers.
Custom
Helicone
Hobby (Free)
10,000 requests/month. 7-day retention. 1 seat. Basic monitoring.
Free
Startup Discount
<2 years, <$5M funding: 50% off first year.
$0 base (usage-based)
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Run Helicone yourself for free.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$79/month. 10k free + usage-based. Unlimited seats. Alerts, reports, HQL query language. 1-month retention.
$79/mo
Team
$799/month. 5 orgs, SOC-2 + HIPAA compliance, dedicated Slack, 3-month retention.
$799/mo
Enterprise
Custom MSA, SAML SSO, on-prem deploy, bulk discounts, forever retention.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Cloudflare Developer Platform vs hobby on Helicone.
| Metric | Cloudflare Developer Platform | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| d1 reads day | 5000000 rows/day | — |
| d1 storage gb | 5 GB | — |
| d1 writes day | 100000 rows/day | — |
| durable objects gb sec | 13000 GB-sec/day | — |
| durable objects requests | 100000 req/day | — |
| kv reads day | 100000 reads/day | — |
| kv storage gb | 1 GB | — |
| kv writes day | 1000 writes/day | — |
| r2 class a ops | 1000000 ops/month | — |
| r2 class b ops | 10000000 ops/month | — |
| r2 egress | free (unlimited) egress | — |
| r2 storage gb | 10 GB/month | — |
| workers cpu ms | 10 ms/invocation | — |
| workers logs events | 200000 events/day | — |
| workers requests day | 100000 req/day | — |
Features
Cloudflare Developer Platform · 18 features
- AI Gateway — Proxy for OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini with caching, analytics, retries, rate limitin…
- D1 — Managed serverless SQLite via sqlite-wasm. Read replicas via replicas keyword.
- Durable Objects — Strongly-consistent objects with storage, pinned to a region. Good for sync/stat…
- Email Routing — Catchall email routing + Email Workers for programmatic handling.
- Hyperdrive — Connection pooler + cache for Postgres. Makes your DB edge-fast.
- Images — Store, resize, transform images. Polish on-the-fly.
- KV — Eventually-consistent key-value at every POP. Good for config, caching.
- Pages — Static + SSR framework hosting (Next.js via OpenNext, Remix, Nuxt, SvelteKit).
- Pages Functions — Workers integrated into Pages for backend logic.
- Queues — Persistent message queues with batched consumers. Exactly-once per consumer grou…
- R2 — S3-compatible object storage with **zero egress fees**.
- Stream — Video upload, encoding, adaptive streaming.
- Vectorize — Vector DB at the edge. For RAG + semantic search.
- Workers — V8-isolate serverless at 300+ POPs. Sub-ms cold starts. JS/TS/Rust/Python (beta)…
- Workers AI — Run LLMs (Llama, Mistral) + image, speech, embedding models at edge via @cf/... …
- Workers Logs — Structured logs with 3-day retention on paid.
- Workflows — Durable step-functions for long-running tasks.
- Zaraz — Third-party script management at edge (analytics, marketing tags).
Helicone · 16 features
- Alerts — Thresholds on error rate, latency, cost, usage. Pro+.
- Async Logging — Log AFTER the LLM call via SDK — zero added latency.
- Cost Tracking — Automatic cost calculation per call by provider/model.
- Dashboard — Request tables, aggregate metrics, cost breakdowns.
- Evaluators — LLM-as-judge + custom evaluators on runs.
- Experiments — A/B test different models/prompts.
- HQL (SQL over traces) — Query your logged data with SQL. Pro+.
- PII Redaction — Automatically scrub emails, credit cards, etc. from logs.
- Prompt Caching — Cache identical requests → save money.
- Prompts & Versions — Store + version + A/B test prompts.
- Proxy Mode — 1-line integration via base URL swap. Captures all requests.
- Rate Limiting — Per-user + per-key rate limit policies.
- Reports — Scheduled email reports with KPIs.
- Self-Hosting — Docker + k8s deployment.
- Sessions — Group related calls (chat sessions, agent runs).
- User Metrics — Per-user cost + usage segmentation.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Cloudflare Developer Platform | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Wrangler CLI | Helicone CLI |
| SDK | — | helicone (npm), helicone-python |
| REST | Cloudflare REST API, D1 HTTP (via Worker), R2 S3-compatible API | Async Logging API, Helicone Proxy, Query API (HQL) |
| MCP | Cloudflare MCP | — |
| OTHER | Workers Runtime (V8) | Helicone Dashboard, Webhooks |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Cloudflare Developer Platform and Helicone are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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