A lightweight Langfuse alternative for AI cost tracking

Langfuse is a full LLM engineering platform: tracing, evals, prompt management. If what you actually open it for is the bill, LLMtrack is the smaller tool. It does AI cost tracking per feature and customer, compares each customer's cost with what they pay you, and stores no prompts.

Checked against Langfuse's own pages on 16 Oct 2026 · 6 min read

Start free, no card How to switch

Quick answer

Keep Langfuse if you use its traces, evals or prompt management. Pick LLMtrack if you only need costs and want margin per customer, a forecast with your budget day, and model-switch advice, with nothing stored but token counts. Plenty of teams run both.

What Langfuse already does well

Langfuse breaks cost down by model, tags and users, and it prices usage types such as cached, audio and reasoning tokens separately. It's open source and self-hostable, and after joining ClickHouse it says "Langfuse Cloud keeps running as-is".

So the case for LLMtrack isn't missing basics. It's scope: a tool built only for the business side of the bill.

Sources: Langfuse cost tracking docs · Langfuse joins ClickHouse

Langfuse vs LLMtrack at a glance

	Langfuse	LLMtrack
Built for	Tracing, evals, prompt management, cost	Cost, margin and forecasting only
Cost by user and tag	Yes	Yes, by feature, model and customer
Customer cost against plan price	Not in its cost tracking docs	Yes, margin per account
Forecast with budget breach day	Not in its cost tracking docs	Yes
Model-switch advice	Not in its cost tracking docs	Switch, Test first or Keep, from independent benchmarks
What gets stored	Full traces, built to include inputs and outputs	Token counts and cost. Prompts are never sent
Open source, self-host	Yes	No. SDKs are open source; the service is hosted
Free plan	50k units/mo · 30 days · 2 users	3,000 requests/mo · 30 days · every feature
Paid plans	Core $29/mo · Pro $199/mo	Pro $11.99/mo · 25,000 requests · 90 days

Langfuse figures from langfuse.com/pricing and its docs, 16 Oct 2026. Langfuse meters "units"; LLMtrack counts requests, so the free tiers aren't directly comparable.

Who should switch, and who should stay

LLMTRACK FITS IF

You open Langfuse for the cost dashboard and little else
You need to know which customers cost more than they pay
You don't want prompts stored anywhere outside your servers

STAY ON LANGFUSE IF

You debug with traces or run evals
You manage prompts there
You need to self-host

Running both is common. Langfuse answers what a chain of calls did; LLMtrack answers what it cost and whether that customer is profitable. The guide to cost per customer for AI features shows the second question worked through.

How to add LLMtrack next to Langfuse, or instead of it

Install the SDK

The LLMtrack SDK for Node and Python is one install and one call after each response. Your Langfuse tracing can stay as it is.

pip install llmtrack-sdk

from llmtrack_sdk import LLMtrack, from_openai_usage
llmtrack = LLMtrack(api_key=os.environ["LLMTRACK_API_KEY"])

res = client.chat.completions.create(model=model, messages=messages)
llmtrack.track(provider="openai", model=res.model,
    feature="summarizer", customer_id="acme-corp",
    **from_openai_usage(res.usage))

02
Reuse your Langfuse names
Use the same tag you already give each call in Langfuse as the LLMtrack feature, and your Langfuse user ID as customer_id. The two dashboards then line up.
03
Add plan prices
Enter what each plan charges, and every customer shows a margin. Check a feature's cost before it ships with the LLM cost calculator.

Questions

Is Langfuse still being developed after joining ClickHouse?

Langfuse says its cloud "keeps running as-is" and that it stays open source and self-hostable, with no planned licensing changes.

Can LLMtrack show traces?

No. It records token counts, model, feature, customer and cost for each request. For traces, keep Langfuse or LangSmith.

Where do LLMtrack's prices come from?

Each provider's published schedule, re-synced daily. The full LLM API pricing sheet is public and dated.

Does it work with LiteLLM or OpenRouter?

Yes. Paste one URL into the gateway's trace settings. See all integrations.

Find out which customers cost more than they pay

Free plan with every feature. No card.

Start free Try the cost calculator

Sources, checked 16 Oct 2026:langfuse.com/pricing langfuse.com, token and cost tracking langfuse.com/blog/joining-clickhouse