# Helmcode vs Munito AI

URL: https://munito.ai/compare/helmcode

Compare Helmcode and Munito AI for European inference: API formats, subscription and usage prices, retrieval, speech, OCR, and deployment.

Choose Helmcode for a flat monthly bill per API key, when your coding agents run hard and a token metre makes the finance conversation difficult. Choose Munito AI when you want to pay for what you use, when you need an Anthropic-compatible API, OCR by the page, decision models, or a region you can prove from a response header.

Plans and limits checked on 2026-11-07. Prices change, so check them at the source.

## At a glance

|                   | Munito AI                      | Helmcode                              |
| ----------------- | ------------------------------ | ------------------------------------- |
| How you pay       | Per token, posted rates        | Per API key, per month                |
| Entry price       | Free tier, then pay as you go  | €399 a month                          |
| Where it runs     | EU, US or global               | "EU data", no data centre named       |
| Region in a header| Yes, `munito-region`           | No                                    |
| Prompts kept      | No                             | "Zero logs"                           |
| API formats       | OpenAI and Anthropic           | OpenAI                                |
| OCR               | PDFs and images, per page      | No                                    |
| Decision models   | Yes                            | No                                    |
| On-premises       | Yes                            | Yes, on Enterprise                    |

## What Helmcode costs

| Plan       | Price      | API keys | Monthly tokens on the metered models | Support        |
| ---------- | ---------- | -------- | ------------------------------------ | -------------- |
| Starter    | €399/mo    | 5        | 5B                                   | Email          |
| Growth     | €1,299/mo  | 15       | 15B                                  | SLA 99.5%      |
| Scale      | €3,199/mo  | 40       | 35B                                  | SLA 99.9%      |
| Enterprise | Custom     | 60+      | Custom                               | Custom SLA     |

Every plan carries unlimited tokens on Qwen3.6 and Gemma 4, and a monthly cap on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash. GLM 5.3 is an add-on at €150 per API key per month. A key is limited to 100 requests a minute, 2M tokens a minute and 1M context per request, with 5 concurrent processes per model, or 10 on the larger ones.

## When the flat fee wins, and when it loses

The honest way to compare is to price your own volume both ways.

Starter is €399 a month for 5 billion metered tokens. At our EU standard rate for GLM-5.3-Flash, $0.15 input and $0.50 output, 5 billion tokens split evenly across input and output costs about $1,625. On that mix, Helmcode is cheaper, and clearly so.

Turn it around. A team that burns 200 million tokens a month on the same model pays about $65 here, and €399 there. The two meet near 1.3 billion tokens a month on that split, and the point moves with the exchange rate, with your input-to-output ratio, and with cached input, which costs $0.030 per million tokens on GLM-5.3-Flash and $0.0060 on DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017.

So: heavy, steady, coding-agent traffic on two models favours a flat fee. Spiky traffic, a pilot, a long tail of small jobs, or anything with a large cached prefix favours a metre.

## How to switch

Both speak the OpenAI API:

```python
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.eu.munito.ai/inference/v1",
    api_key="munitoai_...",
)
```

The same key answers the [Anthropic Messages API](https://docs.munito.ai/compatibility), which matters for a coding team: Claude Code and other Anthropic-shaped harnesses connect with no proxy in between.

## Where Helmcode is stronger

- **A bill you can sign off once.** No token forecast, no overage conversation, no surprise at month end.
- **Unlimited tokens on Qwen3.6 and Gemma 4**, which is a real answer for high-volume, low-stakes work.
- **A published SLA** at 99.5 and 99.9 per cent on the paid plans.
- **Per-key budgeting** that maps onto a team or a project with no extra tooling.

## Where Munito AI is stronger

- **You pay for what you use**, with a free tier to start and no monthly floor. See [Pricing](https://docs.munito.ai/pricing).
- **A larger catalogue**: DeepSeek-V4-Flash, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen3.8-27B, Gemma 4 12B, Kolibri 1 and two decision models.
- **The Anthropic Messages API** beside the OpenAI Chat Completions and Responses APIs.
- **A region you can prove.** `munito-region: EUROPE` comes back on the response; "EU data" in a plan table does not name a data centre. See [Regions](https://docs.munito.ai/regions).
- **A DPA that applies with no signature**, at [legal.munito.ai/dpa](https://legal.munito.ai/dpa), and a published [sub-processor list](https://trust.munito.ai/subprocessors).
- **OCR billed per page** at $0.0044, and **decision models** through the [Decisions API](https://docs.munito.ai/api/createDecision).
- **Sandboxes**: a cloud computer for each agent, on the same account. See [Sandboxes](https://munito.ai/sandboxes).

## What a security review will ask

"Zero logs" and "EU data" are good lines, and a reviewer will still ask which data centre, which sub-processors, what the retention period is on an error path, and what the DPA says. Ask both vendors in writing.

Ours are at [legal.munito.ai/dpa](https://legal.munito.ai/dpa) and [trust.munito.ai/subprocessors](https://trust.munito.ai/subprocessors), and the [security review guide](https://munito.ai/security-review) collects the rest. Our SOC 2 audit and ISO 27001 certification work are in progress.

## Sources

Helmcode, checked 2026-11-07: [pricing](https://helmcode.com/pricing).

Munito AI: [Models and prices](https://docs.munito.ai/models), [Regions](https://docs.munito.ai/regions), [Data privacy](https://docs.munito.ai/data-privacy), [Security](https://docs.munito.ai/security).