What is the best Langfuse alternative for cost tracking?

MarginDash is an alternative to Langfuse focused on per-customer profitability rather than LLM tracing. It syncs actual Stripe revenue and shows realized margin per customer, with budget alerts and a cost simulator.

Can I use Langfuse and MarginDash together?

Yes. Use Langfuse for engineering — tracing, debugging, evals. Use MarginDash for your P&L — per-customer profitability, budget alerts, and cost simulation. They solve different problems and are complementary.

What Langfuse competitors track revenue per customer?

Most Langfuse competitors focus on observability. MarginDash is one of the few that connects AI costs to actual Stripe revenue, showing realized margin per customer with budget alerts when thresholds are hit.

Alternative

Best Langfuse Alternative

Langfuse debugs your traces. MarginDash debugs your business.

Langfuse is a strong LLM observability tool, but it doesn't answer the business question: which customers are profitable? If you're looking for a Langfuse alternative that connects AI costs to actual Stripe revenue and shows margin per customer, that's what MarginDash does.

Feature	Langfuse	MarginDash
LLM tracing	Full trace trees	Use Langfuse for this
Prompt management		Use Langfuse for this
Evaluation framework		Use Langfuse for this
Revenue/margin per customer	Not available
Stripe revenue sync	Not available
Profit-leak alerts	Not available
Cost simulator	Not available
Self-hostable	Yes (MIT)	No (hosted)
Privacy (no prompts sent)	Full traces by default	By default

The question Langfuse can't answer

Is this customer profitable? Langfuse can tell you how many tokens a request used and give you an estimated cost. But it doesn't know your Stripe coupons, your tiered pricing, or your annual credits. MarginDash syncs actual Stripe revenue and shows you the realized margin for every customer — the one number that determines whether your AI features make or lose money.

Profit-leak alerts, not usage alerts

You don't need a 40-step nested trace to see that a customer is costing you $2 per request. MarginDash lets you set margin-based budget limits per customer, per event type, or organization-wide — and sends email alerts when thresholds are hit. You'll know before a customer's AI usage eats through your profit, not after.

Simpler by design

Langfuse requires instrumenting your code with trace trees, spans, and generations — engineering overhead that makes sense for debugging, but not for tracking profitability. MarginDash asks for addUsage() with the model and token count, then track() with the customer ID and revenueAmountInCents. No prompts leave your servers. Use Langfuse for evals; use MarginDash for your P&L.

When to use Langfuse

If you need full LLM tracing, prompt management, evaluation frameworks, or a self-hosted open-source solution, Langfuse is a solid engineering tool. Choose MarginDash when you need to answer the business question: which customers are profitable, which are underwater, and what should you do about it?

The metric that matters

Realized margin, not estimated cost

Other tools estimate cost from tokens. MarginDash reconciles actual Stripe revenue against AI costs — accounting for coupons, tiered pricing, and annual credits. You see who's profitable and who's underwater.

Customer	Revenue	Cost	Margin	Margin %
Plexo Health	$233.25	$277.20	-$43.95	-18.8%
Vantage Ops	$358.86	$421.66	-$62.80	-17.5%
Stratos Cloud	$417.32	$357.64	$59.68	14.3%
Canopy Labs	$350.89	$316.85	$34.04	9.7%
Prism Data	$105.80	$87.23	$18.57	17.6%

Connect AI costs to revenue in a few lines

Other tools estimate cost from tokens. MarginDash reconciles cost against actual revenue. Pass revenueAmountInCents and see realized margin — not guesswork.

// After your existing AI call
md.addUsage({ vendor: "openai", model: response.model,
  inputTokens: response.usage.prompt_tokens,
  outputTokens: response.usage.completion_tokens });

md.track({
  customerId: user.id,
  eventType: "summarize",
  revenueAmountInCents: subscription.amount
});