Best Crypto RPC Providers: Free & Paid Tiers Compared

What is a crypto RPC?

An RPC endpoint is the URL your wallet or dApp uses to read and write blockchain state — every on-chain action goes through one. In 2026 the market has split cleanly into three lanes: multi-chain breadth (Ankr, QuickNode, dRPC), Ethereum/EVM depth (Alchemy, Infura), and chain-specific specialists (Helius for Solana). Pick one primary, one failover, and stop overthinking it. Last verified: 2026-05-27.

Every time MetaMask checks your balance, Uniswap quotes a swap, a bot reads a pool, or an indexer back-fills a contract — it sends a JSON-RPC request to a node. Most teams pick a provider on day one and never revisit until an outage forces them to. That's how Infura's 2020 "Black Thursday" outage took half of Ethereum offline for an afternoon, and how Alchemy's 2023 capacity incidents broke dozens of dApps that had no failover.

Public chain RPCs are rate-limited and shared across millions of users. Anything serving real users — even a small one — needs a dedicated provider with throughput guarantees, archive state where required, and a documented uptime SLA. Free tiers are generous enough in 2026 that there's no excuse for shipping a public URL into production.

The market shook out into three tiers:

1. Mainstream multi-chain providers — Ankr, QuickNode, Chainstack, GetBlock, BlockPI, dRPC. Broad chain coverage, competitive free tiers, generalist tooling.
2. Ethereum-first premium — Alchemy, Infura. Best debugging primitives (trace, debug, simulate), historically narrower chain coverage (Alchemy now supports 90+ networks), highest per-request cost.
3. Chain-specific specialists — Helius (Solana), Pocket / Grove (decentralized). Each owns one wedge that generalists cover only superficially.

Top 9 RPC providers in 2026

Ankr (breadth), Alchemy (EVM dev), QuickNode (add-ons), Helius (Solana), dRPC (decentralised), Infura (legacy + DIN), BlockPI (free-tier value) — plus GetBlock (dedicated nodes) and Chainstack (managed infrastructure). Last verified: 2026-05-27.

Ankr — deep dive

Ankr (Ankr is a multi-chain RPC and indexer provider supporting 80+ networks on Premium with a Freemium tier of 200M API credits/month free) is the answer when the question is "I need many chains and I want one bill."

Best for

Anyone who needs more than one chain. Ankr's Public tier covers 40+ chains (including Ethereum, Polygon, BNB, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Celo, and more) at no cost. The Freemium tier (free, requires signup) unlocks 65+ chains and 200M API credits per month — a usable free tier for moderate production traffic. The Premium pay-as-you-go tier reaches 80+ chains. No other provider matches that breadth at that price point.

Trade-offs

Developer tooling is plainer than Alchemy's — no debug_traceTransaction, no Supernode-style intelligent retries, no transaction simulation API. The Public plan is limited to standard node API (no Trace/Debug methods), a 1,800 req/min rate limit, and a max block range of 1,000 blocks. If your app needs to introspect failing transactions or rebuild state from traces, Ankr is the wrong primary.

Pricing

Freemium: 200M API credits/month free, 1,800 req/min rate limit, 65+ chains. Premium PAYG: $0.10 per 1M API credits. Since Ankr assigns 200 credits per eth_call, effective cost is $0.02 per 1,000 eth_call requests (or $20 per million eth_calls). Solana requests cost 500 credits each. Deal plans are available at $500–$3,000/month with 20% extra credits. Archive is included on Premium.

Why it leads

Coverage × price × free tier. Most multi-chain projects start on Ankr because no other provider gives you 65+ chains on a free tier under one dashboard and one billing relationship. The trade-off is blunter tooling than Alchemy for EVM debugging.

→ Get started with Ankr (Freemium, 80+ chains) (referral link — supports the guide at no cost to you)

Alchemy — deep dive

Alchemy has 90+ supported networks, the sharpest EVM tooling, and a PAYG billing model — the choice when you need to understand what your contracts are doing.

Best for

Serious Ethereum and EVM development. Smart-contract debugging, transaction simulation (alchemy_simulateExecution), full archive traces, webhook-driven indexers (Custom Webhooks, Notify API), and gas-abstracted account-abstraction infrastructure. Alchemy's Supernode (Supernode is Alchemy's intelligent load-balancing layer that distributes requests across internal nodes and adds automatic retries) load-balances across internal nodes for consistent p99 latency under load. Network coverage now spans 90+ chains including Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin (via Rootstock/Botanix L2s), Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, Avalanche, BNB, Sui, Aptos, and more.

Trade-offs

Billing is in compute units with method-specific costs — eth_call is cheap; eth_getLogs over a large block range is expensive. Free tier dropped from 300M CU/mo (the figure cited in many older guides) to 30M CU/mo. PAYG billing starts at $0.45/M CU (first 300M) then $0.40/M CU above that. The old named Growth ($49/mo) and Scale ($289/mo) tiers no longer appear on the official pricing page — only Free, PAYG, and Enterprise are current. Verify your expected CU burn before committing.

Pricing

Free: 30M CU/month, 500 CU/sec throughput. PAYG: $0.45/M CU up to 300M, $0.40/M CU beyond. Enterprise: custom. Estimated average is 27 CU per request, so 30M free CU is roughly 1.1M typical requests/month. Archive is included.

When you should not use Alchemy

If your workload is mostly read-only and on commodity methods, Alchemy is overkill — Ankr or dRPC at a fraction of the effective cost will perform identically.

QuickNode — deep dive

QuickNode covers 83+ chains across 140+ networks — including Solana and Bitcoin — with an add-on marketplace that is the real differentiator.

Best for

Apps that need niche features bundled in: dedicated NFT API, token-API with metadata enrichment, mempool streams, MEV simulation, Yellowstone gRPC for Solana, Ordinals and Runes API for Bitcoin indexing. The QuickNode marketplace has turnkey services no other generalist offers as easily. QuickNode is the launch infrastructure partner for Solana Developer Platform, handling enterprise Solana workloads for Mastercard and Western Union.

Trade-offs

Free tier is 10M credits/month at 15 RPS — the smallest of the major providers at this tier. Credit-billing similar to Alchemy makes cost forecasting hard for non-trivial workloads. Overage rates on paid plans: $0.62/M on Build, $0.55/M on Accelerate, $0.53/M on Scale.

Pricing

Free: 10M credits/month, 15 RPS. Build: $49/month for 80M credits, 50 RPS. Accelerate: $249/month for 450M credits, 125 RPS. Scale: $499/month for 950M credits, 250 RPS. Business: $999/month for 2B credits, 500 RPS. Annual billing discounts available (roughly 15% off).

→ Get started with QuickNode (free tier + add-on marketplace) (referral link — supports the guide at no cost to you)

Helius — deep dive

Helius (Helius is the dominant Solana RPC provider offering stake-weighted QoS, priority transaction landing, LaserStream gRPC, and a native DAS API) is the leading Solana RPC, combining stake-weighted QoS, priority transaction landing, LaserStream gRPC streams, webhooks, and a native DAS API in one provider.

Best for

Any Solana app. Helius is the only Solana RPC that bundles stake-weighted Quality-of-Service (QoS), LaserStream gRPC (Geyser-equivalent) for real-time account updates, enhanced WebSockets (transactionSubscribe), webhooks, and a native DAS (DAS = Digital Asset Standard, Solana's unified NFT and compressed-asset API) API. During the 2024 memecoin-driven congestion events, apps on Helius landed transactions; apps on generic Solana RPCs frequently did not.

Trade-offs

Solana only — useless if you need EVM coverage in the same vendor. Free tier is 1M credits/month at 10 RPS (roughly 100k simple requests/day on a typical call mix), easy to outgrow once you launch. sendTransaction is capped at 1/sec free.

Pricing

Free: 1M credits/month, 10 RPS, 1 sendTransaction/sec. Developer: $49/month for 10M credits, 50 RPS, 5 sendTransaction/sec, staked connections, enhanced WebSockets, LaserStream on devnet. Business: $499/month for 100M credits, 200 RPS, 50 sendTransaction/sec, full LaserStream (mainnet). Professional: $999/month for 200M credits, 500 RPS. Additional credits on paid plans at $5/million.

dRPC — deep dive

dRPC (dRPC is a load-balanced RPC service that routes requests across 60+ underlying node providers across 115 chains and 203 networks) routes requests across 60+ node providers covering 115 chains and 203 networks — use it as your second provider or a cost-effective primary.

Best for

Apps that can't tolerate single-provider outages. dRPC routes requests across multiple node providers transparently — when Alchemy has an incident, you don't notice. One of the highest free tiers available (210M CU per 30 days as of June 2025). Also a useful primary for cost-sensitive multi-chain apps.

Trade-offs

Less control over which underlying node serves any given request — bad for reproducible debugging. trace, debug, and filter methods are disabled on the free tier. No exclusive features beyond routing.

Pricing

Free: 210M CU per 30-day period (reset from account registration date), up to 5 API keys, dynamic rate limit around 2,100 CU/sec. PAYG Growth plan above that — contact dRPC for current rates. The June 2025 free plan update did not affect 86%+ of existing users.

Infura — deep dive

Infura switched to credit-based pricing in 2026 and backed its centralized RPCs with a Decentralized Infrastructure Network (DIN) on EigenLayer — the most meaningful reliability upgrade since 2020.

Best for

Compatibility and legacy integration. Infura is MetaMask's default RPC and many legacy dApps hardcode it. The DIN (Decentralized Infrastructure Network) now routes 13B+ requests/month across 30+ networks using 50+ independent node operators via an EigenLayer AVS, reducing single-point-of-failure risk materially. If you're on Ethereum or Linea specifically, Infura's archive and debug tier are solid.

Trade-offs

Free tier is now 3M credits/day (as of January 7, 2026 — halved from the previous 6M/day). ConsenSys ownership means a slower pace of new features. Native chain support is narrower (40+ networks) vs. Ankr or QuickNode, though DIN partnerships extend functional reach. Debug/Trace API requires the $50/month Developer plan or above.

Pricing (as of May 2026)

Core (free): 3M credits/day, 500 credits/sec, 1 API key. Developer: $50/month, 15M credits/day, 4,000 credits/sec, Debug/Trace API included. Team: $225/month, 75M credits/day, 40,000 credits/sec. Enterprise: custom. Add-on extra credits: $200/month for 55M extra credits/day.

BlockPI — deep dive

BlockPI offers 50M request units per month on its free tier across 40+ chains — the deepest free tier for multi-chain prototyping after Ankr and dRPC.

Best for

Cost-sensitive multi-chain projects at early stage. 50M RU/month free is a meaningful budget for small production workloads.

Trade-offs

Pricing page does not publish specific paid tier rates publicly — contact required for enterprise deals. Less mature documentation than Ankr or Alchemy. Smaller team means feature velocity lags competitors.

Two more providers worth a slot

Beyond the headline seven, these two each own a niche — dedicated nodes (GetBlock) and managed infrastructure (Chainstack). Both run referral programs, so the links below support the guide at no cost to you. Last verified: 2026-05-27.

GetBlock

GetBlock offers shared and dedicated nodes across 50+ blockchains with refreshingly simple per-request pricing. The free tier gives a daily request quota across mainnets; paid plans buy request volume rather than opaque compute units, which makes cost forecasting easy. Dedicated nodes are available when you need guaranteed throughput on a specific chain. Best for teams that want many chains without learning a credit-unit billing model.

→ Get started with GetBlock (50+ chains, free daily quota) (referral link — supports the guide at no cost to you)

Chainstack

Chainstack is the "managed infrastructure" pick — elastic and dedicated nodes across 25+ protocols with one of the better free tiers and predictable, request-based pricing. It leans enterprise: regional deployments, dedicated nodes, and Subgraph hosting sit alongside the standard RPC. If you want a provider that scales from free tier to production without a billing-model rethink, Chainstack is a strong primary.

→ Get started with Chainstack (managed nodes, strong free tier) (referral link — supports the guide at no cost to you)

Head-to-head: Ankr vs Alchemy vs QuickNode

Most apps need exactly one of them, occasionally two.

Best RPC by use case

Multi-chain dApp: Ankr. Ethereum-only with debugging: Alchemy. Solana: Helius. Failover: dRPC. Personal wallet: Ankr public RPC or chain default. Last verified: 2026-05-27.

• Best free RPC for a personal wallet — Ankr's public RPC (paste into MetaMask) or chain defaults via chainlist.org.
• Best RPC for an Ethereum-only dApp with debugging — Alchemy (Supernode + debug_traceTransaction; note: 30M free CU/mo, PAYG above that).
• Best RPC for a multi-chain dApp — Ankr (80+ chains on Premium, 200M free Freemium credits under one API key).
• Best RPC for Solana — Helius (priority transactions, LaserStream gRPC, webhooks, DAS API).
• Best RPC for failover / decentralisation — dRPC (115 chains/203 networks, routes across 60+ providers, 210M free CU/30 days).
• Best RPC for an indexer or backfill job — Alchemy (archive + traces) or Ankr (cheapest PAYG).
• Best RPC for an NFT app — QuickNode (NFT API add-on) or Helius (Solana DAS API).
• Best RPC for a trading bot — Helius on Solana (stake-weighted QoS, priority landing); Alchemy or Chainstack on Ethereum (private mempool relays).
• Best RPC for production load with cost discipline — Ankr (PAYG) or dRPC (free + Growth tier).

How to actually choose an RPC (the workflow)

1. List your chains. If more than 3, default to Ankr or dRPC as primary; otherwise pick the chain's best specialist (Helius on Solana, Alchemy on Ethereum, Ankr on long-tail EVMs).
2. Estimate request volume and method mix. Under roughly 10M requests/month, the free tier of any major provider covers you. Above that, do the math carefully — credit-unit billing means a few large eth_getLogs calls over wide block ranges can blow a CU budget that looks fine on average. Average CU per Alchemy request is about 27; use that as a rough estimate.
3. Check archive needs. debug_traceTransaction, historical state queries, full backfills require an archive node. Archive costs roughly 5–10x full-node pricing. If you only need recent state, don't pay for archive.
4. Plan for failover from day one. Set up two providers and round-robin or fall back. Use viem's fallback transport or ethers FallbackProvider. Any production app needs this; building it later costs more than building it now.
5. Test latency from your users' region. Providers serve from different POPs; benchmark p50 and p99 from where your users actually are, not from your dev laptop. Use a tool like chainlist.org's ping benchmark or roll your own with 100 sequential eth_blockNumber calls.
6. Set up structured cost monitoring. Alchemy and QuickNode have usage dashboards; export to Datadog/Grafana and alert on month-over-month CU growth. RPC bills surprise teams more often than any other infrastructure cost.

Common mistakes

• Shipping a public RPC URL in production. It will throttle the moment you get any real traffic. Public endpoints are for development and the occasional one-off script — never for a production read path.
• Single-provider lock-in. Use a thin abstraction (viem multi-provider with fallback transport, ethers FallbackProvider, web3.py with custom middleware) so swapping is one config change. Vendor portability is a feature; build for it from day one.
• Trusting random RPC URLs. Only use known providers or chainlist.org. A malicious RPC can return fake balances or fake transaction status to fool a UI (it cannot sign transactions for you, but it can lie about whether a transaction landed — which is plenty bad).
• Ignoring rate limits in retry logic. Exponential backoff on 429s, not an infinite loop. Watch for the difference between a per-second limit (transient — retry quickly) and a per-day quota exhausted (hard — stop sending).
• Buying archive when you don't need it. Most apps only query recent state. Archive is 5–10x more expensive and rarely needed for live serving; only your indexer needs it.
• Forgetting WSS endpoints. Subscriptions (eth_subscribe, log streams) over WebSockets are billed differently from HTTP requests. Some teams blow their CU budget on a single chatty WSS subscription that nobody noticed.
• Hard-coding the RPC URL into the frontend. Anyone can crawl your JS bundle, grab your key, and use your quota. Either proxy through a backend you control, or use a domain-restricted public key.

Looking ahead to 2027

A few specific signals to watch:

• Stake-weighted QoS on Ethereum. Solana proved this works; the Flashbots / MEV-Share ecosystem is the closest Ethereum analogue, but mainstream RPCs are experimenting with builder-side priority lanes. Whoever ships this credibly captures the high-value transaction flow.
• DIN-style decentralization as table stakes. Infura's EigenLayer AVS (50+ operators, 13B+ req/month) is the first production-scale decentralized RPC layer. Expect competitors to follow — decentralized routing will become a standard feature, not a differentiator.
• Geographic edge distribution. Multi-region POPs at sub-50ms p99 are table stakes in 2026. The next frontier is true edge (regional cache + read-replica) — Cloudflare and Fastly partnerships are already in motion at Alchemy and QuickNode.
• MEV-aware RPCs as default. Flashbots Protect, MEV-Share, and similar private-transaction relays are being bundled into general-purpose RPC offerings. By 2027, "MEV-protected" should be a default toggle on every major provider's dashboard.
• AI-agent RPCs. Providers are adding agent-friendly endpoints (batch reads, deterministic replay, signed-attestation responses) as x402 and ERC-8004 traffic grows. Helius has shipped agent-priority transaction lanes on Solana; Alchemy has agent-specific SDK primitives in beta.

Risk summary

RPC providers are infrastructure single points of failure. Outages, censorship, data-tampering, and key-leak risks are all real and all have happened in production in 2020–2026. Last verified: 2026-05-27.

• Outage risk. Every major provider has had a multi-hour incident in the past three years. Infura's 2020 Black Thursday outage took down half of Ethereum for an afternoon and is the canonical case study; Alchemy had multiple 2023 capacity incidents; even Ankr has had regional outages tied to underlying node operators. Build for failover or accept the risk explicitly.
• Data-tampering risk. A malicious RPC can return false data — fake balances, fake transaction receipts, fake gas estimates. It cannot forge signatures, but it can mislead your UI into showing a successful transaction that never landed. Mitigation: verify with a second provider for high-value reads, or use a light-client where available.
• Censorship risk. Centralized RPC providers can and have refused to serve traffic from sanctioned addresses. If your app needs to serve users in restricted jurisdictions, decentralized providers (dRPC, Pocket / Grove) or self-hosted nodes are the only durable answer.
• Key-leak risk. Frontend-embedded API keys leak constantly. Always use a backend proxy or a domain-restricted public key, and rotate quarterly. Any key that has ever been pushed to a public repo should be considered compromised forever.
• Pricing-change risk. Infura's January 2026 free-tier cut from 6M to 3M credits/day broke teams that had sized their free-tier budget to the old limit. Pricing schedules can change with 30 days' notice; build your cost forecast with a 2x buffer. Alchemy's free tier similarly dropped from 300M to 30M CU/mo in recent cycles — always re-check the current pricing page before committing architecture to a free-tier assumption.
• Vendor-lock-in risk. Custom endpoints (Alchemy's alchemy_* namespace, QuickNode's add-ons, Helius's DAS and LaserStream) are stickier than they look. If your codebase depends on alchemy_simulateExecution, migrating means rewriting your simulation layer, not just changing a URL.

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This guide is updated as RPC providers change pricing, free tiers, and chain coverage. Last verified May 2026.