Vendor guardrails tell you when an agent fails. Nothing tells you why — or how much it cost.

Anthropic has max_tokens. OpenAI has spending limits. AWS Bedrock has guardrails. None of them give you a forensic trace of what your agent was doing when it went wrong. When it fails, you're grepping logs. When it overspends, you're reading an invoice.

I built a mobile app with AI in the backend. It kept breaking and I had no idea why.

It kept returning wrong results — or erroring out completely. I couldn't see what the model was receiving, what it was returning, or what it cost. So I built the tool that let me see. The cost visibility fell out as a natural and useful byproduct.

A local-first capture layer that gives you complete visibility into your AI backend.

• No tracking code required — hooks into your app natively without changing how you write code.
• Full session recording: every prompt, every response, every token count, every cost — stored securely in your own environment.
• Deterministic replay mode: run your entire test suite offline at zero API cost.
• Embedded visualizer dashboard and MCP server — your AI assistant can query your agent's own traffic.

Agents broke the old observability model — and the window is open right now.

• Agent spend is non-deterministic. A leading agent platform publicly reported one human message spawning 12,000 agent calls in under an hour. Invoice-based controls can't catch that.
• Helicone — the closest proxy-based competitor — went into maintenance mode after its 2026 acquisition. Its users are proxy-comfortable and looking for an exit. Migrating to Orchid is a base-URL change.
• Explainability is becoming mandatory. Analysts predict 70% of organizations will require agentic AI actions in operations to be explainable by 2029. A full-fidelity recording is the audit artifact.

Every alternative requires you to change your code or run a stack of infrastructure.

• LangSmith — framework-locked. If your agent isn't built on LangChain, you're out.
• Langfuse — open source, but production self-hosting means ClickHouse + Redis + Postgres + S3. Orchid is one binary and one SQLite file.
• Helicone — proxy-based like Orchid, but in maintenance mode since its acquisition. No path forward for its users.
• Datadog — an APM add-on. Truncates payloads, and per-span pricing punishes chatty agents.
• Orchid — no tracking code, no infra stack, no cloud dependency. Your data never leaves your environment.

200+ engineers run Orchid — every one of them found it on their own.

No launch, no ads, no VC signal boost. 200+ container pulls and 1,000+ SDK downloads, all from blog posts, forum threads, and organic search. Small numbers, pure signal: developers with this problem are searching for exactly this.

I've shipped developer tools at scale before.

• 18 years building developer tools and AI platforms.
• Led TypeSpec adoption to 30% of Azure at Microsoft — same challenge: getting developers to adopt new infra without changing their workflow.
• Built the developer toolchain that shipped to 150+ enterprise customers for Qualcomm's AI hardware.

Observability is the distribution. Governance is the business.

• The free capture layer earns trust — teams route all their LLM traffic through it.
• That position is the moat: Orchid sits in the traffic path. Everyone else observes; Orchid can enforce.
• Langfuse and Datadog can report that an agent overspent last Tuesday. Orchid can refuse the request that blows the budget — and kill the runaway loop before it burns $400.
• The paid layer is governance: budget enforcement, compliance audit trails, team session sharing. $20/mo individual; per-seat team and enterprise tiers with SSO and shared audit logs above it.

Raising a seed to turn the capture layer into a governance business.

12–18 months of runway to do three things: ship the governance layer — budget enforcement, audit trails, team tiers; convert 10 design partners into paying pilots; and make the first go-to-market hire. GatewayX brings the enterprise relationships to source those design partners. I bring 18 years of shipping proof.