Alchemy vs Infura vs Quicknode vs Chainnodes - Ethereum RPC Provider Pricing Comparison
It can be hard to choose the right node and infrastructure provider for building and running in the Web3 space. To make things easier, we compare four popular providers and their pricing models for different use cases. The providers we compare are Infura, Alchemy, Quicknode and Chainnodes.
We use the table below, which is the up-to-date pricing of those providers as of the date of this post:
Infura:
Alchemy:
Alchemy does not differentiate archival requests.
Alchemy uses a model where every tier includes “compute units”. There is a map of RPC calls and the representing compute units on their docs page. We used a weighted average for several use cases to come up with an average number of requests per month.
Light Use Average compute units per request: 55
Heavy Use Average compute units per request: 645
Heavy Use + Subscriptions compute units per request: 1000
The rate limit per second heavily depends on the type of calls but can vary from 0.1 requests per second to 10.
Quicknode:
Quicknode has a similar compute unit based model like Alchemy, though they call it API Credits and archival calls are heavier, hence take up more of the API Credits.
Below you can see averages based on assumed usage categories:
Light Use Average API Credits per request: 5
Heavy Use Average API Credits per request: 28
Heavy Use + Subscriptions API Credits per request: 30
Please note: beyond the Scale plan, you can pay 10$ per million API Credits overage. If you are an enterprise customer, the price per million can go down a little but don’t expect to get below 2-3$, even if you are one of the heaviest RPC users in the world.
The rate limit per second depends on the tier and can be seen below.
Chainnodes:
Chainnodes does not differentiate archival requests.
Used in your personal Wallet
If you want a reliable RPC to use in your Metamask (or other) wallet application and participate in Airdrops, NFT mints and simply send transactions, you will have the following average usage:
- Up to 50 transactions per day
- ~5000 read calls per day
- No event logs or other WebSocket subscriptions
Infura
On the Infura free plan, there are 100,000 requests per day included. In this scenario, you would likely use 5,000-10,000 requests per day, so easily fit within the Free plan for 0$ per month.
Alchemy
With 150,000-300,000 requests per month, you would fit into their free tier for 0$ per month.
Quicknode
With 150,000-300,000 requests per month, you would fit into their free tier for 0$ per month.
Chainnodes
With 150,000-300,000 requests per month, you plus up to 80 friends would fit into a single free plan for 0$ per month.
DeFi App with Dashboard and Analytics Page
If you run a DeFi app like Uniswap, 1Inch, SushiSwap, Aave or similar, you will need a lot of archival requests for your analytics pages, eth_call for simulations and more. The below assumes that you have 10,000 active users, but can be multiplied by whichever factor you want.
Requests per User per day: 5,000
Users per day: 10,000 / 30 = 333
Requests per Month: ~50M
Of those archival: ~10M
Infura
On Infura, you would be slightly above the Team plan, so you would look at 1,000$ per month for the Growth plan.
Alchemy
On Alchemy, this would fall under the heavy use category, with 23x the base Enterprise plan described above. You are looking at 28,000$ per month.
You should be aware that Alchemy’s rate limit is very low even on the Enterprise plan. You would probably need to contact their Enterprise support team in order to increase your throughput to suit your 10k+ users.
Quicknode
On Quicknode, this would fall under the heavy use category. You would use up all your API Credits from the scale plan and 1260x overage the 1M additional API Credits.
Assumed total costs: 299$ + 12,600$ = 12,899$ per month.
At this point, you might be able to get into an enterprise agreement with Quicknode to reduce your costs for overages to ~5-8$ per million. This would reduce the bill to ~7,000$ per month.
Chainnodes
On Chainnodes, the 50M requests per month would easily fit into the Team plan for 250$ per month. The high rate limit of 100 requests per second would also help you sustain burst periods with much more usage.
On the Team plan, you would be equipped to scale up to 30,000 active users per month with the usage described above.
Data analytics and archival
If you are using custom TheGraph nodes or Chainlink instances, or you are a company like Nansen AI, specialized in analyzing on-chain behaviour using a lot of trace, debug and archival calls and subscriptions to multiple events, or if you are a DEX trading bot operator watching the mempool, you would look at usage like described below.
Requests per Day: 10M
Of those Archival: 5M
Subscriptions to newHeads, newPendingTransactions
Infura
On Infura, you would break the Growth plan and would need to sign up for a custom 2x Growth plan for 2,000$ per month. Be aware that even then you would be scratching at the limit and not support burst days as there is a tight 10M requests per day limit. If you break above that, you would need to go for 3,000$ per month.
Alchemy
On Alchemy, this would fall under the heavy use plus subscriptions use case. You would break the enterprise plan 214x and would look at 250,000$ per month. Again, you would need to discuss rate limit increases in order to support this use case.
At this point, it makes sense to sign a commitment contract with Alchemy to get a reduced price. Or you look at alternatives.
Quicknode
On Quicknode, you would have to overage 8800x on top of your Scale plan.
This would sit at: 299$ + 88,000$ = 88,299$ per month.
At this point, you might be able to negotiate down to 2-3$ per million. This would reduce your cost to ~17,000$ per month.
Chainnodes
On Chainnodes, this use case would fall under the Growth Plan for 1,000$ per month. With 500 requests per second, you would be perfectly equipped to handle bursts. There are no rate limits per day or archival call limits in place, so there will be no disruption to your product!
Summary
As you can see, all providers start with generous free tiers, but the pricing with most node providers quickly deteriorates once your project starts getting traction. With Chainnodes, you get up to a 3x price difference to Infura and up to 250x when compared to Alchemy. All of that while making no compromise in reliability, speed and feature set. Being the only RPC provider without a single second of downtime during the recent Arbitrum Airdrop, you will be in perfect hands, no matter if you are a developer, operating an aspiring Startup in the DeFi space, or a sophisticated enterprise with lots of on-chain activity.