Comparison
Synapse OS vs LiteLLM, CostMeter & BurnLens
There are good free tools for watching your AI spend. Here's an honest look at what each one is built for, so you can pick the right one — even if it isn't ours.
Hosted drop-in proxy for Claude Code, Claude Desktop and OpenAI.
Best for: Teams that want shared budgets, prompt trimming and loop circuit breakers without running anything themselves.
Solo €0 · Team €49/mo (7-day trial)
Open-source LLM gateway with spend tracking per key and team.
Best for: Engineers happy to self-host and run their own gateway across many providers.
Open source (self-hosted)
Free local proxy with one-command install and budget enforcement for Claude Code.
Best for: Solo developers who want a quick local spend limit on one machine.
Free
What Synapse OS adds
| Hosted — nothing to install or run | Yes |
| Shared team budgets & governance | Yes (Team plan) |
| Trims wasted context before it is billed | Yes (Solo and up) |
| Stops runaway agent loops (circuit breaker) | Yes |
| Stores your prompts | No — passes through memory only |
| Works with Claude Code / Cursor via MCP | Yes |
Descriptions of other tools are based on their public pages, checked October 2026. Features change — check each site for the latest.
Which should you pick?
- Just you, one laptop, want a hard spend limit fast: try CostMeter.
- You like running your own infrastructure across many providers: LiteLLM.
- You want cost per repo or pull request: BurnLens.
- You want a hosted proxy that trims waste, stops runaway loops and gives your team shared budgets: Synapse OS.
See what you'd save
Free plan, no card needed. Test with a sample payload — no API key required.
Get started free