Why I built Ajah after Helicone went into maintenance mode

Vignesh Reddy — Sat, 30 May 2026 08:30:51 +0000

The Problem

In March 2026, Helicone — one of the most popular
LLM observability tools — was acquired by Mintlify
and went into maintenance mode. Thousands of
developers were left looking for an alternative.

But the deeper problem wasn't just Helicone.
Every LLM observability tool available today has
one of these problems:

Cloud-locked (your prompts leave your server)
Acquired and abandoned
Only does one thing (cost OR observability OR evals)
Requires sending sensitive data to third parties

For enterprises in healthcare, finance, and
government — none of these tools work. They
legally cannot send prompts to external servers.

What I Built

Ajah is a self-hostable LLM gateway that sits
between your application and any LLM provider.

It does 5 things in one tool:

1. Gateway Proxy
Point your app at Ajah instead of OpenAI directly.
One line change. Supports 9 providers automatically
detected from your API key prefix.

2. RAG Verification
When your app uses retrieval-augmented generation,
Ajah verifies whether the LLM response is actually
grounded in your source documents. Contradictions
are flagged before they reach users.

3. Hallucination Flagging
Every response is scored for hallucination risk
in parallel — zero latency added. Uses local ML
models, no external API calls.

4. Multi-Agent Session Tracing
Visual step-by-step trace of every agent run.
Cost, quality, and

DEV Community: Vignesh Reddy

Why I built Ajah after Helicone went into maintenance mode

The Problem

What I Built