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Spanlens
MIT-licensed LLM observability with one-line setup, agent tracing, PII detection and cost anomaly alerts
0Visit Spanlens
https://www.spanlens.io/
About Spanlens
Spanlens is an MIT-licensed LLM observability platform whose main design goal is that instrumenting an application should cost one line rather than an afternoon. A CLI initialiser rewrites the call sites for you, after which every OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini request is logged with its cost, latency and token counts, and multi-step agent workflows are traced into a Gantt view that shows where the time and money actually went. Beyond straight logging it runs three checks that most cost dashboards do not: anomaly detection on a three-sigma basis, PII and prompt-injection detection on request content, and a model recommendation pass that proposes cheaper models with a dollar-figure saving attached rather than a vague suggestion. Recent SDK releases added Ollama support for local models and LangGraph tracing, so self-hosted and graph-structured agent stacks are covered alongside the hosted APIs. The licensing position is the sharpest part of the pitch: the vendor states the project is fully MIT with no `ee/` folder, meaning there is no enterprise-only directory carved out of the open-source repository — self-host with Docker Compose and every feature listed on the paid tiers is available at zero cost. The hosted tiers exist to sell managed retention, seats and alerting rather than to gate functionality, and the site publishes direct comparisons against Langfuse and Helicone.
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Key Features
Spanlens Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- +No open-core carve-out — self-hosting gets every paid feature
- +PII and prompt-injection checks come standard rather than as a security add-on
- +Cost recommendations are quantified in dollars, not left as advice
⚠️ Cons
- −Hosted free tier hard-429s at 50K requests instead of degrading gracefully
- −Provider coverage is OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Ollama — narrower than gateway-style tools
- −Retention on Pro tops out at 90 days
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