Complete tracing, hard budget control, and full GDPR/AI Act compliance — without sending your prompts to the US. Migration took under 10 minutes. Why I Ditched Helicone for a EU-Hosted LLM Observability Platform (and Saved €400/month) TL;DR Helicone is great… until you realize every single prompt and response is going through US servers. For European teams, this became a serious compliance risk. Here’s why I migrated to AIWatch (part of Luxkern) and what changed in production. The moment everything changed We had a customer support agent running on Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Everything was working smoothly… until our DPO asked the question we couldn’t easily answer: “Where exactly are the prompts containing our customers’ personal data being sent?” Answer: San Francisco, via Helicone. Even with SCCs and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework in place, we were still transferring PII and our proprietary system prompts (containing core business logic) to a US third party. For a side project, no big deal.…