Competition research — 18 September 2026

Scope: LLM observability, MCP gateways, agent governance, agent evals, AI spend controls, agent audit receipts. Prices and claims below are from vendor pages opened on this date, plus a small set of first-party blogs/docs. Secondary aggregators were used only as pointers, never as the source of a price.

Verdict for CryptoBook: do not ship a Langfuse/Helicone/LangSmith clone. Observability is cheap, open-source, and fully occupied. Enterprise agent governance just had a two-week vendor rush (Okta, IBM, Broadcom, Dataiku). The remaining wedge is a small-team permit plane: English allow/deny/ask rules, hard spend caps on the user’s own keys, and a signed shareable receipt — not GRC, not a trace UI, not a prepaid model wallet.

Helicone / Mintlify — CONFIRMED maintenance mode

The brief’s claim is true, with two caveats.

Confirmed from both parties, 3 March 2026:

• Helicone: “Helicone’s services will remain live for the foreseeable future in maintenance mode. This means security updates, new models, bug & performance fixes all keep shipping.” Source: helicone.ai/blog/joining-mintlify
• Mintlify: “Helicone will continue operating in maintenance mode—security updates, bug fixes, and new models will keep shipping. We’ll work closely with every customer to support a smooth migration to another platform.” Source: mintlify.com/blog/mintlify-acquires-helicone

Caveats (do not overstate):

1. The product is not shut down. Pricing is still live (Hobby free / Pro $79 / Team $799 / Enterprise). Signup CTAs still work. Source: helicone.ai/pricing
2. Status is operational as of 18 Sep 2026 04:24 UTC. helicone.ai reports 100% uptime on the marketing site; api.hconeai.com 98.15%; EU API 94.76% with multi-hour outages in July–August. Source: status.helicone.ai
3. Competitor pages (Preloop, OpenObserve, Curate-Me) claim “new signups closed” and “roadmap frozen.” Helicone’s own pricing page still offers “Get started for free.” Treat “closed to new signups” as unverified competitor marketing, not a first-party fact.
4. Mintlify is absorbing the team into docs/knowledge infrastructure, not continuing Helicone as an observability company.

Implication: Helicone’s 16k-org proxy install base is a migration pool, not a hole to clone into. Anyone who ships another request-log dashboard will be compared to a dead-but-still-running product and to Langfuse at $29.

Competitor table

Adjacent (not in the brief’s vendor list, but they close the same jobs)

Category map (what is actually crowded)

                    IDENTITY                 RUNTIME POLICY              EVIDENCE
                 Okta Agent SSO           Broadcom AgentMinder        Agent Receipts (spec)
                 IBM Verify/Entra         Preloop MCP firewall        Preloop ledger
                                          Obot / Portkey MCP          IBM Trace Inspector
                                                                          Langfuse traces

  MODEL TRAFFIC                 EVALS                     SPEND
  LiteLLM / Portkey             Phoenix / Braintrust      LiteLLM hard caps
  Helicone (frozen)             LangSmith / Langfuse      Cloudflare spend limits
  LangSmith LLM Gateway         IBM AgentOps Agent        Portkey virtual-key budgets
                                                          Preloop per-agent budgets

Every cell above has a funded incumbent except the intersection of:

• English (or yaml-in-repo) permit rules a human can write in 60 seconds
• Hard cap on the user’s own keys (BYOK, no wallet)
• A receipt a third party can verify without an account
• Self-serve, no sales call, works on a VPS

That intersection is candidate A in BRIEF.md. Preloop covers 70% of the mechanism (firewall + budgets + audit) but is still a control plane for operators, not a permit + receipt for the person who hired the agent.

What a new product must NOT clone

Instant kill if the homepage, SDK, or pricing looks like any of these:

1. Trace / span / session-replay UI — Langfuse $29, Phoenix $0, AgentOps $40, LangSmith, Datadog. Commodity.
2. Prompt manager + playground + datasets + LLM-as-judge — Langfuse, LangSmith, Phoenix, Braintrust $249. Evals are a category, not a wedge.
3. OpenAI-compatible proxy whose value is “we log every request” — Helicone’s dead body. LiteLLM/Portkey already do this better and are alive.
4. Virtual keys, fallbacks, semantic cache, load-balancing — LiteLLM OSS, Portkey $49, Cloudflare. Gateway features are table stakes, not a product.
5. Enterprise agent directory / shadow-AI discovery / access certifications — Okta for AI Agents, IBM Orchestrate, Dataiku, WSO2, Obot Sentry. Requires IdP sales motion.
6. “SSO for agents” / first-class agent identity — Okta Agent SSO is free on core SSO as of 24 Aug 2026. Competing with free Okta is suicide.
7. Mission/intent policy engines sold to CISOs — AgentMinder. VMware-shaped deal.
8. Prepaid model credits / unified billing wallet — Helicone Credits, LangSmith Gateway Credits, OpenRouter. Brief forbids reselling model access as a prepaid wallet. Also a money-transmission-adjacent mess.
9. MCP server catalog + hosting — Obot, Portkey registry. Platform, not a permit.
10. “We make you EU AI Act / SOC2 / CRA compliant” — Preloop already warns this is evidence not certification; the brief forbids fake compliance. Do not sell certificates.
11. AgentOps-the-name or “control plane” as the headline — IBM shipped an “AgentOps Agent” GA 31 Aug 2026. The phrase is burnt.
12. Heavy SDK / instrumentation as the only path — Langfuse/LangSmith/AgentOps. Drop-in URL or base_url + a yaml file only.

Safe to borrow as a thin implementation detail (not the product): OpenAI-compatible proxy hop, OTel export out to Langfuse if the user wants traces, hash-chained signatures (Obsigna/agent-custody patterns), BYOK.

White space that is still real in September 2026

These gaps survived the vendor rush. They are specific enough to be a product, small enough to run on one VPS, and not a me-too of the table above.

1. Permit gateway in English, not CEL/YAML-for-operators (strongest)

Preloop’s MCP firewall is real: ordered allow/deny/require-approval with CEL on arguments. Obot/Portkey do RBAC on tools. AgentMinder does mission/intent for VMware.

Nobody ships “paste a URL, write three English rules, the agent is now capped” for a freelancer, a five-person startup, or a client who does not have a platform team.

Example rules the incumbents do not productize as a playground:

• Allow github.create_pr on repo acme/web. Deny git.push --force. Ask a human before stripe.refund over $50.
• Spend at most $8/day on my Anthropic key. Hard stop, not an email.
• Share a link that proves those rules fired.

This is BRIEF candidate A. Preloop is the threat; beat it on time-to-first-permit and receipts a non-engineer can open.

2. Shareable, third-party-verifiable receipts as the product (strong)

Obsigna, agent-custody, IETF draft-sahu-agent-action-receipts-00 (16 Aug 2026), PipeLab, and Preloop’s ledger all exist. All are logs or protocols. None is:

• A hosted page: https://…/r/abc that a client opens, sees “agent X called tools Y under policy Z, spent $4.12 of a $10 cap, 14:02–14:19 UTC”, verifies the signature in-browser, no account required.
• Exportable PDF/JSON a freelancer attaches to an invoice.
• Explicitly not a legal attestation or SOC2 report.

Freelance/client receipts (BRIEF candidate C) are narrow as a market but the receipt object is the differentiator for A. Do not build only for freelancers; make the receipt the viral artifact.

3. agent-permit.yaml in the repo, Dependabot-shaped (real, secondary)

No incumbent makes policy-as-a-file that PRs itself the way Dependabot made dependabot.yml viral. Preloop has YAML+CEL in git, but the product is the console. A GitHub App that comments “this PR’s agent would have been denied rm -rf / would have spent $40” is unoccupied.

Risk: looks like a feature of Preloop/Obot in 6–12 months. Ship the hosted permit URL first; yaml-in-repo as the viral loop, not the MVP.

4. Spend caps on tool actions + BYOK, not just tokens (narrow remaining)

LiteLLM/Cloudflare/Portkey/Preloop cap model dollars. Almost nobody productizes:

• Cap this MCP tool at N calls/day.
• Cap this agent identity at $X of the user’s key (we never hold the money).
• Show the user a running receipt, not a Grafana board.

Stay on the right side of the brief: never take a prepaid balance, never resell tokens.

5. What is not white space (kill list for idea agents)

• Quantum classroom / QCaaS: hardware we don’t have; BRIEF already flags as likely kill.
• Generic “AI agent platform.”
• Another MCP gateway.
• Another eval harness.
• Enterprise GRC “agent inventory.”
• Anything that logs into third-party sites for the user (Ninth Circuit CFAA: agents act for users; don’t be the one holding their cookies).

Pricing cheat-sheet (self-serve only)

A CryptoBook SaaS should sit under $29 to start (Langfuse Core is the psychological ceiling for “infra I might not need”) or be usage-priced on permits/receipts, not traces.

Implications for the pivot

1. Confirm Helicone maintenance mode — yes. Use it as a distribution story (“point the same base_url at a living permit plane”), not as a reason to rebuild Helicone.
2. Do not compete with Langfuse on price or with Okta/IBM/Broadcom on GRC. They will crush a me-too.
3. Preloop is the product to differentiate against, not Langfuse. Same job (govern agents), wrong UX (control plane, CEL, operator console, no shareable receipt). If we cannot explain the difference in one sentence, kill the idea.
4. Receipts are a protocol today, not a business. Hosted, human-readable, third-party-verifiable receipts are still open.
5. Spend control is solved for tokens, unsolved for “what the agent is allowed to do with my tools, on my keys, with a proof I can forward.”

One-sentence wedge that still holds on 18 Sep 2026:

A single URL that sits in front of an agent’s tools and model key, enforces English allow/deny/ask plus a hard dollar cap on your key, and emits a signed receipt anyone can open — without becoming your LLM vendor, your IdP, or your auditor.

URLs actually opened

First-party product / pricing / status:

• https://langfuse.com/pricing
• https://www.helicone.ai/pricing
• https://www.helicone.ai/blog/joining-mintlify
• https://status.helicone.ai/
• https://www.mintlify.com/blog/mintlify-acquires-helicone
• https://www.langchain.com/pricing
• https://www.agentops.ai/
• https://portkey.ai/pricing
• https://portkey.ai/mcp
• https://arize.com/pricing
• https://arize.com/phoenix
• https://www.okta.com/newsroom/press-releases/okta-brings-first-class-identity-to-ai-agents-with-agent-sso/
• https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-orchestrate/pricing
• https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-orchestrate/agent-control-plane
• https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/new-in-ibm-watsonx-orchestrate-cross-platform-agent-discovery-custom-evaluation-and-agentops-agent-goes-ga
• https://www.broadcom.com/products/identity/agentminder
• https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/product-releases/64636
• https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/product-releases/64641
• https://www.dataiku.com/company/news/dataiku-launches-the-platform-for-ai-success
• https://preloop.ai/
• https://preloop.ai/vs/helicone
• https://docs.preloop.ai/
• https://obot.ai/
• https://obot.ai/mcp-gateway/
• https://www.litellm.ai/ai-gateway
• https://www.litellm.ai/pricing
• https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/features/spend-limits/
• https://agentreceipts.ai/
• https://github.com/agent-receipts
• https://agent-custody.dev/receipts/

Pricing numbers for Braintrust were taken from the live page https://www.braintrust.dev/pricing (search extract of that URL, 18 Sep 2026). LiteLLM Enterprise licensing detail: https://docs.litellm.ai/docs/enterprise.