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Langfuse: what 21 of the Fortune 50 use to watch their AI agents

Thanks for commenting "TRACE" — here's everything from the post in one place: what it does, how to try it free, and the real catch.

What it is

Langfuse is an open-source platform that traces every prompt, response, and step your AI takes — not just the final answer. When an AI agent gives a wrong answer, Langfuse is how you find out where it went wrong, instead of hearing about it from a user first. Their own numbers, from langfuse.com: 10+ billion observations tracked monthly, used by 21 of the Fortune 50, 100,000+ engineers building on it. Real companies named on their site include Canva, Twilio, Intuit, Cisco, and Expedia.

Try it — two lines of Python

Terminal
pip install langfuse openai
Python
from langfuse import observe from langfuse.openai import openai @observe() def story(): return openai.chat.completions.create( model="gpt-4o", messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is Langfuse?"}], ).choices[0].message.content

Two ways to run it, both free

PathWhat you get
Self-hostedGenuinely free forever, your own infrastructure. Running in ~5 minutes with Docker.
Langfuse Cloud (Hobby)Free, no card. 50,000 observations/month, 30-day retention, 2 users.
Self-host quickstart
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/langfuse/langfuse.git && cd langfuse && docker compose up

The repo itself

32,700+ stars, YC W23, pushed code the same day this post was written — actively maintained, not an abandoned side project. License is precise, not blanket MIT: the core is MIT-licensed, but anything under the repo's ee/ (enterprise) directories ships under a separate, non-open license.

Not just big numbers

Real, notable open-source projects run their own AI tracing on Langfuse, per its own README: Firecrawl (the tool behind Daily Delta's very first post, 56K★), Langflow (116K★), Open WebUI (109K★), LlamaIndex (44K★), and Flowise (43K★).

Recap

The catch

The free Cloud plan caps at 50K observations/month and 30-day retention — fine for a side project, not production scale (Core plan starts $29/mo for that). Self-hosting is free but real infra work — Docker, Kubernetes, or Terraform — not a one-click deploy. Enterprise features (SSO enforcement, audit logs, SCIM) are paid-only.

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