Magnetic materials with highly anisotropic chemical bonding can be exfoliated to realize ultrathin sheets or interfaces with highly controllable optical or spintronics responses, while also promising novel cross-correlation phenomena between electric polarization and the magnetic texture. The vast majority of these van-der-Waals magnets are collinear ferro-, ferri-, or antiferromagnets, with a particular scarcity of lattice-incommensurate helimagnets of defined left- or right-handed rotation sense, or helicity. Here we use polarized neutron scattering to reveal cycloidal, or conical, magnetic structures in DyTe3, where insulating double-slabs of dysprosium square nets are separated by highly metallic tellurium layers. We identify a hierarchy of energy scales with - in order of decreasing strength - antiferromagnetic exchange interactions, magnetocrystalline anisotropy, and periodic modulations of the exchange energy. The latter are attributed to magneto-elastic coupling to the unconventional charge order in DyTe3. This easily cleavable metallic helimagnet also hosts a complex magnetic phase diagram indicative of competing interactions. Our work paves the way for twistronics research, where helimagnetic layers can be combined to form complex spin textures on-demand, using the vast family of rare earth chalcogenides and beyond.