{"slug":"rpc-cost","title":"Cheapest RPC provider, priced per workload across 18 ranked providers","subtitle":"The monthly bill each RPC provider would send for the same workload, normalised across Compute Units, Request Units, credits and flat requests, at three volumes and every plan tier.","category":"RPCs","metric":"Monthly cost, dapp mix at 10M requests","unit":"usd","status":"live","higherIsBetter":false,"filters":null,"cohorts":[{"tier":"usage","label":"Billed per request","headline":true,"url":"https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost","api":"https://openchainbench.com/api/stat/rpc-cost","sentence":"BlockPI posts the lowest monthly cost, dapp mix at 10M requests at $29.50 (latest value) across 15 ranked providers, measured on Dapp frontend, 10M requests/mo, Cheapest paid plan.","leader":{"name":"BlockPI","slug":"blockpi","value":29.5},"measured":15,"rankings":[{"name":"BlockPI","slug":"blockpi","p50":29.5,"p99":29.5,"successRate":100},{"name":"Chainstack","slug":"chainstack","p50":49,"p99":49,"successRate":100},{"name":"Dwellir","slug":"dwellir","p50":49,"p99":49,"successRate":100},{"name":"OnFinality","slug":"onfinality","p50":49,"p99":49,"successRate":100},{"name":"dRPC","slug":"drpc","p50":60,"p99":60,"successRate":100},{"name":"NOWNodes","slug":"nownodes","p50":102.195,"p99":102.195,"successRate":100},{"name":"Alchemy","slug":"alchemy","p50":125.475,"p99":125.475,"successRate":100},{"name":"QuickNode","slug":"quicknode","p50":129.6,"p99":129.6,"successRate":100},{"name":"Validation Cloud","slug":"validation-cloud","p50":167,"p99":167,"successRate":100},{"name":"thirdweb","slug":"thirdweb","p50":171,"p99":171,"successRate":100},{"name":"GetBlock","slug":"getblock","p50":199,"p99":199,"successRate":100},{"name":"Ankr","slug":"ankr","p50":200,"p99":200,"successRate":100},{"name":"Infura (MetaMask Developer)","slug":"infura","p50":225,"p99":225,"successRate":100},{"name":"Moralis","slug":"moralis","p50":249,"p99":249,"successRate":100},{"name":"Tatum","slug":"tatum","p50":287,"p99":287,"successRate":100}]},{"tier":"dedicated","label":"Dedicated capacity","headline":false,"url":"https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost#tier=dedicated","api":"https://openchainbench.com/api/stat/rpc-cost?tier=dedicated","sentence":"Dwellir, Unlimited Nodes & dedicated clusters posts the lowest monthly cost, dapp mix at 10M requests at $119 (latest value) across 6 ranked providers, measured on Dapp frontend, 10M requests/mo, Cheapest paid plan.","leader":{"name":"Dwellir, Unlimited Nodes & dedicated clusters","slug":"dwellir-unlimited","value":119},"measured":6,"rankings":[{"name":"Dwellir, Unlimited Nodes & dedicated clusters","slug":"dwellir-unlimited","p50":119,"p99":119,"successRate":100},{"name":"Zeeve","slug":"zeeve","p50":149,"p99":149,"successRate":100},{"name":"GetBlock, Dedicated & Limitless nodes","slug":"getblock-dedicated","p50":150,"p99":150,"successRate":100},{"name":"Chainstack, Dedicated Node & Unlimited Node","slug":"chainstack-dedicated","p50":198,"p99":198,"successRate":100},{"name":"Allnodes","slug":"allnodes","p50":320,"p99":320,"successRate":100},{"name":"QuickNode, Flat Rate RPS","slug":"quicknode-flat-rate","p50":848,"p99":848,"successRate":100}]},{"tier":"reference","label":"Free public, not ranked","headline":false,"url":"https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost#tier=reference","api":"https://openchainbench.com/api/stat/rpc-cost?tier=reference","sentence":"Cheapest RPC provider, priced per workload across 18 ranked providers. Awaiting first run.","leader":null,"measured":1,"rankings":[{"name":"PublicNode (by Allnodes)","slug":"publicnode","p50":0,"p99":0,"successRate":100}]}],"value":29.5,"leader":{"name":"BlockPI","slug":"blockpi","value":29.5},"leaders":[{"name":"BlockPI","slug":"blockpi","value":29.5}],"rankings":[{"name":"BlockPI","slug":"blockpi","ms":{"p50":29.5,"p90":29.5,"p99":29.5,"mean":29.5},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"Chainstack","slug":"chainstack","ms":{"p50":49,"p90":49,"p99":49,"mean":49},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"Dwellir","slug":"dwellir","ms":{"p50":49,"p90":49,"p99":49,"mean":49},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"OnFinality","slug":"onfinality","ms":{"p50":49,"p90":49,"p99":49,"mean":49},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"dRPC","slug":"drpc","ms":{"p50":60,"p90":60,"p99":60,"mean":60},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"NOWNodes","slug":"nownodes","ms":{"p50":102.195,"p90":102.195,"p99":102.195,"mean":102.195},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"Alchemy","slug":"alchemy","ms":{"p50":125.475,"p90":125.475,"p99":125.475,"mean":125.475},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"QuickNode","slug":"quicknode","ms":{"p50":129.6,"p90":129.6,"p99":129.6,"mean":129.6},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"Validation Cloud","slug":"validation-cloud","ms":{"p50":167,"p90":167,"p99":167,"mean":167},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"thirdweb","slug":"thirdweb","ms":{"p50":171,"p90":171,"p99":171,"mean":171},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"GetBlock","slug":"getblock","ms":{"p50":199,"p90":199,"p99":199,"mean":199},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"Ankr","slug":"ankr","ms":{"p50":200,"p90":200,"p99":200,"mean":200},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"Infura (MetaMask Developer)","slug":"infura","ms":{"p50":225,"p90":225,"p99":225,"mean":225},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"Moralis","slug":"moralis","ms":{"p50":249,"p90":249,"p99":249,"mean":249},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4},{"name":"Tatum","slug":"tatum","ms":{"p50":287,"p90":287,"p99":287,"mean":287},"successRate":100,"sampleSize":4}],"sparkline":[29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5,29.5],"sampleSize":60,"asOf":"2026-10-16T21:02:56.875Z","freshness":{"asOf":"2026-10-16T21:02:56.875Z","ageHours":0.5,"stale":false},"measured":15,"ranked":15,"headline":"BlockPI posts the lowest monthly cost, dapp mix at 10M requests at $29.50 (latest value) across 15 ranked providers, measured on Dapp frontend, 10M requests/mo, Cheapest paid plan.","quote":"BlockPI posts the lowest monthly cost, dapp mix at 10M requests at $29.50 (latest value) across 15 ranked providers, measured on Dapp frontend, 10M requests/mo, Cheapest paid plan. Source: OpenChainBench (https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost).","cite":{"plain":"OpenChainBench. \"Cheapest RPC provider, priced per workload across 18 ranked providers\". Retrieved 2026-10-16. https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost","bibtex":"@misc{ocb_rpc_cost,\n  author = {OpenChainBench},\n  title  = {Cheapest RPC provider, priced per workload across 18 ranked providers},\n  year   = {2026},\n  url    = {https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost},\n  note   = {Retrieved 2026-10-16}\n}","apa":"OpenChainBench. (2026). Cheapest RPC provider, priced per workload across 18 ranked providers. Retrieved October 16, 2026, from https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost","ris":"TY  - GEN\r\nAU  - OpenChainBench\r\nTI  - Cheapest RPC provider, priced per workload across 18 ranked providers\r\nPY  - 2026\r\nUR  - https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost\r\nY2  - 2026-10-16\r\nER  - \r\n"},"pageUrl":"https://openchainbench.com/benchmarks/rpc-cost","ogImage":"https://openchainbench.com/api/og/rpc-cost","source":"https://github.com/ChainBench/OpenChainBench/tree/dev/harnesses/rpc-cost","methodology":["Cohort. 18 providers billed per request, ranked per workload. Blockdaemon (every paid plan behind a sales call) and Coinbase CDP (Base only) cannot fill a cell. Flat-rate nodes are priced in the calculator, not the per-workload grid. PublicNode and the Solana Foundation endpoints are published but never ranked: free and usable, and PublicNode publishes no rate limit at all, so calling it cheapest would be true and useless.","Chains. Ethereum and Solana only: they are the two chains every provider in the cohort prices, and pricing a third would mostly price which providers serve it. Several providers weight other chains differently, so a Base or Polygon bill is not this page's Ethereum bill.","Normalisation. Every provider's published method table is applied to the profile's method mix to get weighted units per request, and that figure is published as rpc_cost_units_per_request so the arithmetic is checkable.","Most large providers do not price per method at all. Chainstack charges 1 Request Unit for a read and 2 at archive depth, decided by block age (127+ blocks behind tip), while debug and trace are 2 at any depth. QuickNode weights per chain, Ethereum 20 credits and Solana 30, with x2 for advanced calls and x4 for large ones. GetBlock multiplies a chain factor spanning 10 to 300.","Archive. Handled per provider rather than as a uniform surcharge, because it is not one. Chainstack doubles on block age. BlockPI adds 30% to the whole endpoint. Alchemy, dRPC and QuickNode charge no archive premium at all, and neither does Dwellir, which bills 1 credit per response on every method, archive, debug and trace included; that archive is served on its shared plans is stated in Dwellir's own Ethereum comparison post rather than its price table.","GetBlock publishes an independent archive column, 2x on plain reads and 3x on debug and trace, so no single multiplier is correct and its own published formula is arithmetically impossible against its own API. Tatum serves archive but has never published what it charges for it in the credit model, so it is reported unpriceable on archive workloads rather than assigned a guess.","Eligibility before price. A plan is ranked only if it can serve the workload. Daily caps are compared against the daily share, not the monthly total, because Infura's credits do not roll over. Hard stops (Infura, NOWNodes Start and Pro, QuickNode's trial) make a plan unavailable above its cap rather than merely expensive. Published throughput is checked against the sustained rate the volume requires. Missing trace or archive access is unavailability, not cost.","Plan tiers. Provider plan names do not line up, Chainstack calls $49 Growth and Helius calls $499 Business, so plans are banded by monthly price into free, entry (to $50), growth (to $300), business (to $1,000) and enterprise. The default view is the cheapest paid plan. Free plans are not banded here at all: every one ties at $0, so this page would order them by their overage bill, and it is bench 283 that ranks them on what their allowance buys.","One-off offers are not monthly prices. QuickNode's one-month trial, NOWNodes' one-month Start and Tatum's lifetime 100,000 credits each cost $0 and never renew, so they are excluded rather than quoted. All three are banded as paid plans by what they become: $49 Build, EUR 20 Pro, $49 Starter. A plan that recurs at $0 is kept, because that is a price. Validation Cloud's Scale carries no subscription and its first 50M compute units are free.","Any volume, not only three. The per-workload grid prices 10M, 100M and 1B requests a month because a metric needs a fixed label. The calculator prices anything from 100,000 to 5B, reading a curve the same harness emits through the same model, with a point at every plan boundary and a straight line between them, which is the real shape of a metered bill. The three grid volumes are marked on its track so the two can be checked against each other.","Free tiers moved to bench 283 (rpc-free-tier), ranked by what the allowance buys rather than by price. GetBlock advertises 20 requests per second and 50,000 compute units per day: at its own advertised rate the daily allowance is gone in 125 seconds. Infura's lasts 1.7 hours a day, OnFinality's 2.8 hours, Alchemy's 1.2 days a month. Bench 283 publishes the allowance converted into requests of each profile, alongside the throughput cap that is often the real ceiling.","Add-ons are priced with their prerequisites. Infura's $200 extra-credits pack cannot be bought on the free tier, so its real entry cost is Developer at $50 plus $200, which loses to Team at $225. Helius advertises dedicated nodes from $2,900 and states that mainnet requires a Business or Professional plan, so the floor priced here is $2,900 plus the $499 Business plan, $3,399 a month.","Packages are pro-rated, not treated as subscriptions. BlockPI sells 500M Request Units for $49 over 60 days and 4,000M for $299 over 90 days, and its own page says 'without monthly subscription'. Both price and allowance are scaled to 30 days ($24.50 and $99.67), and unused units are forfeited at expiry.","Currency and period. A 30-day month throughout. NOWNodes prices in EUR and stays in EUR in the catalogue; the ECB reference rate sits in the catalogue header so the conversion is visible at the point of use rather than baked into a number.","Verification. Every figure was collected and then independently re-verified against the primary source by a second pass, which corrected about thirty values, including two that had been computed and then presented as published. A later adversarial audit corrected a dozen more, most of them in this prose rather than in the data.","Conflicts between a provider's own pages are reported rather than silently resolved. Alchemy's free-tier throughput was settled by a dated docs commit, Helius's archival credit cost by dating the documentation table, and Ankr's live model by reading its production application bundle, because its most machine-readable pricing page describes a model that is not the one being sold.","Freshness. The catalogue is committed and human-verified, not scraped, because most of this cohort publishes price as prose. 23 artifacts carry a baseline hash recorded when a human last read the numbers under them; the harness re-hashes those on a loop and alerts the maintainers on a change, and the page shows the catalogue date.","The rest are marked for manual re-reading and deliberately not polled: a page that churns for reasons unrelated to price would alarm every cycle and teach everyone to ignore the alarm. Every figure keeps the date a human last read it in the catalogue, so a figure nobody has re-read is visible as such.","Fifteen of the ranked providers expose a machine-readable pricing artifact, whether JSON or raw markdown, and four of them, GetBlock, NOWNodes, QuickNode and Tatum, expose unauthenticated pricing APIs a harness can poll directly. 23 artifacts across the cohort are re-hashed on a loop.","Measured, not just read. Chainstack's rules were tested against its billing API with 291 counted calls: 1 Request Unit for a full request, archive above 2x full, debug and trace at 2 RU even ten blocks behind tip (so the surcharge is method-driven, not recency-driven), and an HTTP batch of 30 billed as 30 rather than 1. The 127-block archive boundary the indexer and trace profiles rest on is confirmed to within five blocks: it is not 64, not 256 and not absent.","Two measurement traps worth publishing. Chainstack's per-node Request Unit column does not reconcile: two nodes came in at minus 66 and plus 59 against prediction, cancelling on the total, so it cannot be used for spend attribution.","And that counter is not live. It stayed flat for twelve minutes while 57 calls were served, because each hourly row covers the hour ending at its label and appears about fifty minutes later. A naive read, burst, re-read measurement concludes Chainstack bills nothing at all.","Two limits come from what providers do not publish, and no amount of access would close them. QuickNode publishes its rate limits in requests per second while its own support states they are enforced in credits per second, and declines to give those numbers, so the throughput check here compares requests against a ceiling that really applies to weighted units: on a heavy method mix QuickNode reaches its real limit earlier than this page predicts.","And Alchemy publishes no fallback cost for methods absent from its table, so a workload using an unlisted method cannot be priced at all. The five profiles here use only listed methods, but a reader with an unusual mix cannot extend the table without asking Alchemy.","Method costs are modelled once per provider, varied by chain and by archive depth but not by plan. Where a provider negotiates or varies weights per account, the figures here are its published list prices.","What is still not measured. These are published prices, not invoices. Alchemy and QuickNode carry no credit, compute-unit or quota header on any response, so their billed units cannot be confirmed without dashboard credentials we do not hold. Where a provider's real charge is non-deterministic by design, dRPC routes to third-party operators that can rewrite the price downward and exposes no per-response cost header, the published rate is reported as an upper bound and labelled as one."],"license":"CC-BY-4.0"}