Respan is live · free plan, paid from $199/mo billed annually · last verified 25 Oct 2026 · viability healthy
Respan
Respan routes every agent run through one LLM gateway, then traces and evaluates it with production evals.
If routing, traces and evals currently live in three different tools, Respan collapses them onto one span model, and its evaluators score the same production traffic your dashboards already see. The entry price is the friction: $199/mo billed yearly, capped at 5 members, after a Free tier limited to 100k logs. Compare Langfuse or Helicone for tracing-only, Portkey for gateway-only.
Verdict generatedVerified 5d ago · liveness 84/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/respan
- Engineering teams running multi-provider LLM apps that want routing, tracing, and evals on one endpoint
- Agent builders debugging tool calls and multi-turn threads at the trace level
- Teams that want evaluators scoring sampled live production traffic, not just offline test sets
- Platform teams enforcing per-customer budgets and rate limits with BYOK key management
- Single-model apps with no failover or provider-switching need — the gateway adds overhead
- Solo developers on a tight budget: Free caps at 100k logs and 1k scores before the $199/mo billed yearly Team tier
- Buyers wanting standalone monitoring without adopting a routing layer
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Skip Respan if you run a single model with no failover need and only want a tracing dashboard — you would pay $199/mo billed yearly for a gateway you never route through, and Helicone or Langfuse cover tracing alone.
Team still includes only 100k logs; going past that costs $8 per additional 100k logs, so a busy production app pays well above $199/mo billed yearly.
Free at $0 with unlimited seats and the full platform is unusually generous for evaluation, but 412 requests/min and 7-day retention mean it is a trial, not a production tier. Team at $199/mo billed yearly lands mid-market: cheaper than an Enterprise observability contract, pricier than Langfuse or Helicone for tracing alone — you are paying for the gateway and evals in the same bill. Enterprise is volume-priced with self-hosting, SAML and HIPAA.
In short
Respan — Respan routes every agent run through one LLM gateway, then traces and evaluates it with production evals. Best for Engineering teams running multi-provider LLM apps that want routing, tracing, and evals on one endpoint, Agent builders debugging tool calls and multi-turn threads at the trace level, Teams that want evaluators scoring sampled live production traffic, not just offline test sets. Free to start; paid plans from $199/mo billed annually.
No head-to-head comparison for Respan yet — the alternatives below are the closest matches we list.
What is Respan?
Respan — Respan routes every agent run through one LLM gateway, then traces and evaluates it with production evals. Best for Engineering teams running multi-provider LLM apps that want routing, tracing, and evals on one endpoint, Agent builders debugging tool calls and multi-turn threads at the trace level, Teams that want evaluators scoring sampled live production traffic, not just offline test sets. Free to start; paid plans from $199/mo billed annually.
Respan is an LLM gateway plus observability and evaluation stack for teams running AI agents in production. Point the SDK you already use at one endpoint and you reach 1,000+ models across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock, Groq, Fireworks, Together, Perplexity, Azure OpenAI and a dozen others, switching provider by changing a single word in the call. Fallbacks take over when a model errors or rate-limits (Respan publishes 99.99% availability with fallbacks against 96.43% on a single provider), response caching serves repeat requests cheaply, and a BYOK key vault carries budgets and rate limits per key, per customer, or org-wide. Everything passing through the gateway lands as a span, so monitoring and evals read the same data. Trace trees capture LLM calls, tool runs, retrievals and agent turns with input, output, latency, cost and tokens attached, and dashboards slice requests, errors, cost and tokens by model, key or user with Slack, email and webhook alerts on thresholds. Evaluators compose an LLM judge, a deterministic code check and a human annotation queue into one score, then run against sampled production traffic or an uploaded CSV so you can compare score distributions across prompt versions and models before shipping. Recent releases add Guardrails V2 with a dedicated span-01-security model (October 2026), Span-02, an open-weight decision model with anytime reasoning (October 2026), scenario generation inside Datasets, and PII redaction extended to prompt templates and variables. Respan suits engineering teams that want gateway, tracing and evals feeding one dataset rather than three vendors. It is less compelling for single-model apps, and the Team tier at $199/mo billed yearly plus a 5-member cap is a real decision point for small teams.
Key features
- One API endpoint reaching 1,000+ models across major providers
- Switch providers by changing one word in the SDK call
- Automatic fallbacks and auto retries on errors and rate limits
- Response caching with hit counts and cost/token savings
- BYOK key vault with budgets and rate limits per key, customer, or org
- Respan Router: task-aware model routing on Span-01, no markup
- Guardrails V2 blocking prompt injection and jailbreaks, free with gateway
- span-01-security model for prompt guardrails
- Span-02 open-weight decision model with anytime reasoning
- Trace trees over LLM calls, tool runs, retrievals, and agent turns
- OpenTelemetry span ingestion and multi-modality tracing (image, voice)
- LLM-as-judge evaluators with deterministic code checks and annotation queues
- Online evaluations sampling live production traffic
- Dashboards with Slack, email, and webhook alerts
- Prompt management with collaborative IDE and version control
Behind the verdict
We'd reach for Respan the moment a team is multi-model in production. The core pitch is coherent rather than a feature pile: one endpoint, spans for every LLM call and tool run, and evaluators that sample live traffic instead of a static test set. When something breaks in a support agent at 3am, the trace tree tells you which step burned the latency and the cost. The caching and BYOK budget controls are the sleeper features. For per-customer spend limits on an API product, a key vault with org-wide caps and rate limits saves building that logic yourself. Where it bites: the Free tier caps at 100k logs, 1k scores, 5 datasets and 2 evaluators, fine for a prototype but not real traffic. Team is $199/mo billed yearly with a 5-member seat cap and 8,400 requests/min proxy throughput, so a 10-person platform group either pays for extra seats at $15/member or moves to Enterprise. The proxy ceiling is worth checking against your peak. Compare against Langfuse and Helicone if you only need tracing, or Portkey if the gateway is all you want. Respan's argument is consolidation, and it only pays off when you actually use all three layers. Regulated buyers needing self-hosting or SAML SSO are looking at Enterprise. Two caveats from the latest releases. Guardrails V2 and the span-01-security model are recent; test their false-positive rate on your own traffic before turning them on in the request path. And Span-02, the open-weight decision model, is new enough that we'd benchmark it against your existing router before switching traffic.
Models under the hood
as of 2026-10-23
Limitations
- Free caps at 100k logs, 1k scores, 5 datasets, 2 evaluators, 5 prompts, 1 workspace, 412 requests/min proxy throughput and 7-day default retention.
- Team at $199/mo billed yearly raises throughput to 8,400 requests/min and retention to 30 days but still includes only 100k logs and 10k scores; extra logs run $8 per 100k and extra scores $1 per 1k, and Team includes 5 members with additional seats at $15 per member per month.
- Custom SLAs, volume discounts and a dedicated support engineer are Enterprise-only.
as of 2026-10-20
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Is Respan still active?
Respan is live · free plan, paid from $199/mo billed annually · last verified 25 Oct 2026 · viability healthy.
Viability score
How well maintained and how widely used is Respan? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →What's new in Respan
Checked 10 days agoAcross the latest 4 updates: 2 feature updates, 1 launch and 1 changelog entry.
Introducing Span-02: Anytime Reasoning for Decisions
Span-02 is an open-weight decision model with anytime reasoning: given a deadline it returns current best probabilities over choices, yes/no, scores and numbers, and handles images and screens.
Guardrails V2 and span-01-security model launched
Guardrails V2 lets users configure prompt protections, and span-01-security is a specialized Span-01 model for prompt guardrails. Saved views gain personal and project visibility.
Simulation moves to Datasets, self-service account deletion added
Scenario generation now lives in Datasets and simulation runs appear alongside experiments. Models gain modality filters and improved catalog organization.
Admin API keys can manage limit policies
Admin API keys can now manage limit policies while keys still cannot raise their own caps. PII redaction extends to prompt templates and variables.
What do users say about Respan?
What people actually say about Respan — is it worth it?
Our community sentiment research written Jul 23, 2026 is more than 90 days old, so it is being re-reviewed against current data and is not shown.
How we verified this
Every listed fact about Respan— pricing, features, links, status — is re-read from the vendor's own pages by our verification pipeline and each change is logged with a date; the last pass ran on 25 Oct 2026. Pages mix model-assisted synthesis with human review; see how we verify.
Verification history
We have re-verified Respan 20 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — changed link health
- — changed features, integrations, our verdict, summary, who should skip it, who it suits, pricing tiers, description
- — changed link health, SSL certificate
- — changed limitations, pricing page
- — changed pricing fit, use cases, pricing tiers, setup time, who should skip it, hidden costs, our verdict, who it suits, models, switching out, switching in, limitations, integrations, features, description
- — changed description, who it suits, our verdict, features, integrations, who should skip it, pricing tiers, summary
Showing the 6 most recent of 20 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
How much does Respan cost in 2026?
Respan: Free to start; paid plans from $199/mo billed annually. Pricing last verified 25 Oct 2026.
Plans compared
Every published Respan tier, its price as the vendor publishes it, who it fits, and what it adds over the tier below. The 12-month cost projection follows.
| Plan | Price | Billing | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | — | A developer or small team validating the gateway and evals on a prototype, with unlimited seats and no credit card required.Adds: Starting tier: full platform with 100k logs, 1k scores, 5 datasets, 2 evaluators, 5 prompts, 1 workspace, 412 requests/min and 7-day retention. |
| Team | $199/mo billed annuallyVendor: “$199/mo billed yearly” | monthly, billed annually | A startup shipping a multi-model agent to production that needs 30-day retention, PII masking, and a private Slack channel.Adds: Adds unlimited datasets, evaluators and prompts, 8,400 requests/min, 30-day retention with PII masking, 10k scores and 5 members, at $199/mo billed yearly. |
| Enterprise | Contact us | quote | A large organization needing self-hosted deployment, SAML SSO, custom retention, or a HIPAA BAA before it can ship.Adds: Adds cloud or self-hosted deployment, Google and SAML SSO, custom retention and throughput, volume discounts, custom SLAs and a dedicated support engineer. |
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Respan's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Free at $0 with unlimited seats and the full platform is unusually generous for evaluation, but 412 requests/min and 7-day retention mean it is a trial, not a production tier. Team at $199/mo billed yearly lands mid-market: cheaper than an Enterprise observability contract, pricier than Langfuse or Helicone for tracing alone — you are paying for the gateway and evals in the same bill. Enterprise is volume-priced with self-hosting, SAML and HIPAA.
Has Respan's pricing changed?
No plan price for Respan has moved since we began logging in Aug 2026; the pricing page is re-read on every verification pass.
Who should pick Respan?
Pick Respan if you are Engineering teams running multi-provider LLM apps that want routing, tracing, and evals on one endpoint, Agent builders debugging tool calls and multi-turn threads at the trace level, Teams that want evaluators scoring sampled live production traffic, not just offline test sets, Platform teams enforcing per-customer budgets and rate limits with BYOK key management.
Look elsewhere if you are Single-model apps with no failover or provider-switching need — the gateway adds overhead, Solo developers on a tight budget: Free caps at 100k logs and 1k scores before the $199/mo billed yearly Team tier, Buyers wanting standalone monitoring without adopting a routing layer.
Skip it if Skip Respan if you run a single model with no failover need and only want a tracing dashboard — you would pay $199/mo billed yearly for a gateway you never route through, and Helicone or Langfuse cover tracing alone.
GeneratedReal-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Respan actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Points the existing OpenAI SDK at the Respan endpoint, lists Claude and Gemini as fallbacks, and sets a monthly budget per customer key.
Outcome: Provider outages and rate limits get absorbed by fallback routing, and spend per customer is capped before it reaches an invoice.
Samples 2% of production support_replies spans, writes an evaluator combining an LLM judge and a format check, then runs the old and new prompt against the same dataset.
Outcome: Compares score distributions side by side and ships only the version that measurably wins, with the trace for each low score attached.
Runs a Red Team campaign for prompt injection, system-prompt leakage, and secret disclosure, then enables Guardrails V2 in the gateway.
Outcome: Known attack patterns get blocked at the gateway with span-01-security, and campaign results are reviewable per goal.
Use cases
- Debugging multi-agent workflows in production to find which sub-agent failed
- Building eval pipelines that combine LLM judges, code checks, and human reviewers
- A/B testing prompt variants across models and deploying the winner to production
- Monitoring cost and latency per model, key, or customer to control spend
- Creating regression test suites from real production traces
- Setting cost and request limits per API key to prevent abuse
- Blocking prompt injections and jailbreaks at the gateway with Guardrails
- Running Red Team security campaigns before an agent launch
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Respan — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
An engineer pointing an existing SDK at the Respan endpoint sees the first traced span in minutes; Gateway, tracing, and basic dashboards are a same-day setup. Evals take longer — expect a few hours to define an evaluator, sample production data, and get comparable scores. Free starts without a credit card, so you can validate the endpoint before committing to Team at $199/mo billed yearly.
Switching to or from Respan
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From Portkey: point the SDK at the Respan endpoint, move fallback lists and budgets into the key vault, then compare traced spans against your old dashboards.
- →From Helicone: swap the proxy base URL, keep your OpenAI SDK calls, and rebuild alerts as Respan monitors on cost, error rate, and latency.
- →From Langfuse: send OpenTelemetry spans to Respan and re-create evaluators as LLM-judge plus code-check compositions.
- →From a hand-rolled logging table: ingest OpenTelemetry spans, then use the SQL editor to reproduce the queries you relied on.
- ↗To Langfuse: export logs as CSV or JSONL from batch export and re-ingest spans into Langfuse for tracing-only needs.
- ↗To Helicone: point the SDK back at Helicone's proxy and rebuild monitors and alerts there; evals would need a separate tool.
- ↗To Portkey: move provider keys and fallback lists into Portkey configs; trace history would need to come from a JSONL export.
Integrations
Resources & guides
- Documentationrespan.ai
What is Respan?
Respan is a full-stack LLM engineering platform for developers and PMs.
- Resourcerespan.ai
Overview
Integrate Respan with your LLM stack
- Resourcerespan.ai
Core concepts
Spans, traces, threads, and how Respan organizes your LLM data.
- Resourcerespan.ai
Changelog
Helpful link from respan.ai
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Respan”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Respan” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Respan.
Official links
What are the best Respan alternatives?
The closest alternatives to Respan we list are Langfuse, Helicone and LangChain. Ranked by direct product-type match, not category overlap.
| Alternative | Pricing | Starts at | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Langfuse | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
| Helicone | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
| LangChain | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
Alternatives to Respan
View all
Tools that pair well with Respan
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Respan, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Langfuse
Open-source LLM observability: trace agents, manage prompts, and run evals on one MIT-licensed platform.
Helicone
Helicone is an AI gateway and LLM observability platform that routes, caches, and logs traffic across 100+ model providers.
LangChain
LangChain's open agent frameworks plus LangSmith — tracing, evals, deployment, sandboxes and an LLM gateway for agents in production.
Frequently asked questions
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