In the following example we are going to show you what it looks like to resell a model using Helicone as your platform.

Let’s say you are finetuning a model and it is hosted on hugging and you want to be able to sell that model to certain customers. However, you don’t want to build out

  • dashboards to monitor the model
  • API management
  • rate limits
  • billing
  • authentication
  • etc

How would you go about using Helicone’s platform to do this?

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Step 1: Create a Model and deploy to an endpoint

You can do this using HuggingFace or any other model hosting platform.

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Step 2: Add your own top level domain on Helicone

You will need to register a domain that you can give your customers to access your model. Right now this process is manual, but we are working on automating it.

The domain will look something like my-startup.hconeai.com.

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Step 3: Create a new customer that you are going to sell the model to

You can do this by going to the Customer Portal tab and clicking Add Customer.

Here you can create a new customer and give them access to your model, and set different limits on that customer, like spend or request limits

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Step 4: Authenticate your customer

Since our proxy lives on the edge and not within a secure network, we need to authenticate the customer before they can access the model.

You can do this by providing a Provider Key, which is simply a Bearer token that you will receive from the proxy when a customer makes a request.

The Provider Key can be anything you want! This is just a way to protect your public endpoint.

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Step 5: Give your customer access to your model

Once you created a Customer Account you can add your customers to their new account.

Optionally if you opt in, you can register your own deployment for the dashboard they can use to login. For example dashboard.mystartup.com.

You can do this by clicking into a customer and clicking Invite Members.

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Step 6: Customer makes a request to your model

Now that you have a customer account, a customer can make a request to your model, by logging into their dashboard. You can preview their dashboard by clicking View on the customer account.

Once you click view, you will be brought to a version of the Helicone that only your customer can see.

Customers can now navigate to the Developer tab and mint a new key they can use to access your model.

To go back to editting the customer, click the Back to Portal button on the top left.

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Step 7: How your customers will use your model

Now that your customer has a key, they can make a request simply by changing the baseUrl.

Here is an example of an OpenAI compatible model:

client = OpenAI(
  api_key="your-api-key-here", # The api key they generated in the previous step
  base_url="https://my-startup.hconeai.com/v1",
)

That’s it! Now your customers can use your model and you can charge them for it.

IntroBilling by usage