Helicone entered maintenance mode after its March 2026 acquisition by Mintlify. Here are the best alternatives for teams that need an actively developed AI gateway with deeper enterprise governance, MCP support, and production-grade reliability. Why Teams Are Leaving Helicone Helicone built a loyal following as one of the earliest LLM observability platforms, earning over 16,000 organizations as users since its Y Combinator W23 launch. Its proxy-first approach was elegant: change your OpenAI base URL, add a Helicone API key as a header, and every LLM request was automatically logged, metered, and displayed on a dashboard. No SDK installation, no instrumentation refactoring. That chapter closed in March 2026 when Mintlify acquired Helicone. The founding team joined Mintlify in San Francisco to build AI knowledge infrastructure, and Helicone entered maintenance mode. Security patches, bug fixes, and new model support continue shipping, but active feature development has stopped.…