Blockchain APIs and RPC Node Providers: Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode and 10 More

Picking a blockchain API is usually a fast decision that becomes expensive later: a free tier that looked generous turns out to price your heaviest method at many times the simple ones, a websocket subscription bills per block, or a feature you built on only exists at one vendor. Almost every page ranking for this search is written by one of the providers it compares, or by a hosting company selling something else.

This guide sets out the criteria first, then 13 providers with pricing taken from their own pricing pages, a worked cost example across their different units, status-page incident logs, compliance claims and the lock-in risk of each. Everything here comes from each provider’s own pricing pages, documentation and status pages, public code on GitHub, and dated news reports for past incidents. None paid to be included, and there are no affiliate links on this page.

Last updated 14 October 2026.

What is a blockchain API?

A blockchain API is a set of endpoints that lets software read blockchain data (balances, blocks, logs, contract state) and broadcast signed transactions, without operating a node yourself. Google’s AI Overview for this search (checked 14 October 2026) gives the same one-line definition. What it leaves out is that “blockchain API” covers three different products, and providers mix them:

• Node RPC (JSON-RPC): the raw methods every client exposes, such as eth_call, eth_getLogs and eth_sendRawTransaction on EVM chains. Ethereum’s documentation states that “every Ethereum client implements a JSON-RPC specification,” which is why an RPC endpoint from one provider can usually be swapped for another’s (ethereum.org JSON-RPC docs, last updated 28 June 2026). Most providers serve it over HTTPS and WebSocket (WSS); WSS is what you use for subscriptions such as new block headers.
• Enhanced or indexed APIs: pre-computed data no single RPC method returns, such as all tokens held by a wallet, NFT metadata, transfer history or prices. Alchemy’s Token and Transfers APIs, Moralis’s Wallet API and Helius’s DAS (Digital Asset Standard) API are examples. These save you from building an indexer, but they are proprietary.
• Streams and webhooks: push delivery of on-chain events to your backend, for example QuickNode Streams, Alchemy Webhooks or Helius LaserStream (gRPC).

Market data APIs that sell exchange prices and order books are a separate category and are not covered here.

What is a blockchain node, and when do you need an archive node?

A node is a machine running a chain’s client software. A full node “verifies and follows the latest state of the network” and keeps only recent state; an archive node is configured “to build an archive of all historical states” (ethereum.org, archive nodes page, last updated 3 April 2026). You need archive access when you query state at an old block, such as a wallet’s token balance at block 15,537,393.

Sending transactions and reading current state do not need it. The same page says most clients’ Ethereum archives need more than 12 TB, while Erigon stores the same data in under 3 TB, which is why most teams rent archive access rather than run it. Several providers charge archive calls at a premium: Chainstack bills 2 request units for an archive call instead of 1.

Does Ethereum use RPC?

Yes. Ethereum applications talk to nodes through JSON-RPC, and the RPC URL your wallet or app uses is simply the address of a node (yours or a provider’s) that answers those calls. MetaMask, for example, names Infura as its default RPC provider in its privacy notice (last revised 30 September 2026). Other chains follow the same pattern with their own method sets: Infura’s status page, for example, tracks a separate Bitcoin HTTPS JSON-RPC API. It is not universal or permanent, though: QuickNode’s status feed on 14 October 2026 announced a Sui testnet upgrade that “Includes JSON RPC decommission”, so check each chain’s own interface before you assume an EVM-style endpoint exists.

How to choose a blockchain API or RPC provider: the criteria

This site judges every provider against the five criteria in its methodology (track record, transparency, security practices, pricing clarity, jurisdiction coverage), then adds criteria specific to node infrastructure:

1. Chain and network coverage: not the headline count but whether your exact chains, testnets and archive depth are covered. Counts are inconsistent even on the vendors’ own pages (QuickNode shows “75 chains · 131 networks” in a header and “79 blockchains across 137 networks” in its FAQ on the same page).
2. API types: JSON-RPC over HTTPS and WSS, archive, debug and trace methods, enhanced APIs, streams and webhooks.
3. Pricing unit and method weights: compute units (CU), credits, request units (RU) or flat requests. The weight per method matters more than the price per million units. See the worked example below.
4. Throughput: requests per second (RPS) or CU per second on your plan, and what happens at the limit (HTTP 429 errors, or automatic overage billing).
5. Reliability evidence: a public status page with an incident history you can read, not only an uptime percentage on the homepage.
6. Lock-in and decentralisation: how much of your code would break if you moved, and whether one company’s outage takes your app down.
7. Compliance: SOC 2 or ISO 27001 reports if your customers or regulators ask for vendor due diligence. Treat a badge on a homepage as a claim until you have the report under NDA.

The 13 providers at a glance

Serial numbers match the order of the reviews below. All prices are list prices in US dollars from each provider’s own pricing page, checked 14 October 2026.

Sources: each provider’s pricing page and homepage, checked 14 October 2026. Chain counts are the vendors’ own claims and are not like-for-like (some count networks, some count chains, some include testnets).

How this list was built

The starting pool was every provider named in Google’s results, AI Overview and People Also Ask answers for “blockchain api”, “rpc node provider” and “alchemy vs infura vs quicknode” on 14 October 2026, plus other widely used providers. For each provider the following were checked: the pricing page, the method-weight documentation where published (Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode, Ankr, Chainstack, BlockPI), the homepage’s compliance and uptime claims, the public status page’s incident feed for the four largest (Infura, Alchemy, QuickNode, Chainstack), GitHub repositories for SDK status, and dated news reports for past incidents. There was no hands-on benchmarking, so this page makes no latency or speed claims of its own.

Blast API (Bware Labs) was dropped: its site now says “Blast has been deprecated” and directs users to migrate to Alchemy, which announced it was acquiring Bware Labs in a post last updated 29 August 2024. Data-only APIs such as Blockstream’s Esplora explorer API and Blockchain.com’s API rank for this keyword but are single-chain data services, not RPC providers, so they are not reviewed.

Compute units vs credits: what 10 million requests actually cost

This is the comparison the ranking pages skip. Each provider prices a different unit, and each unit has a different weight per method. Two workloads, priced on 14 October 2026 from each provider’s own published weights and list prices, using the cheapest published self-serve plan that covers the volume:

• Workload A: 10 million eth_call requests a month on Ethereum mainnet (a typical read-heavy dApp backend).
• Workload B: 1 million eth_getLogs requests a month (a typical indexer or event-driven backend).

Weights: Alchemy compute unit costs; Infura (MetaMask Developer) credit costs; QuickNode API credits; Ankr and Chainstack pricing documentation. All checked 14 October 2026. Infura’s daily figure assumes a 30-day month spread evenly; Infura quotas are daily, so a traffic spike can hit the cap even when the monthly total fits. QuickNode’s own pricing page shows two different overage rates for Build ($0.62 in the comparison table, $0.43 on the plan card), so both are given.

Three things follow. First, the “price per million units” headline is meaningless on its own: Ankr’s $0.10 per million credits becomes $20 per million EVM requests once the 200-credit weight is applied. Second, method mix changes the comparison: Infura weights eth_getLogs at about three times eth_call and Alchemy at more than twice, while QuickNode charges both at 20 credits, so a log-heavy indexer costs relatively less on QuickNode than a read-heavy backend does.

Third, rate limits can force an upgrade before volume does: Alchemy’s free tier allows 300 CU/s, which is about 11 eth_call requests a second, so a backend that bursts above that will see 429 errors on the free plan even if its monthly total is small. Before you commit, export a day of your own request logs, count calls by method, and multiply by each provider’s weights.

WebSocket subscriptions are billed too. Infura charges 50 credits per block for a newHeads subscription and 300 per block for logs, so one always-on logs subscription costs credits on every new block whether or not anything matches. Check this for any provider before you leave subscriptions open.

Uptime claims vs what the status pages show

Homepage uptime figures are claims, not measurements you can audit. Alchemy’s homepage says 99.99%, QuickNode’s 99.99%, Chainstack’s “99.99%+”, Helius’s 99.99%, Tatum’s 99.99% and NOWNodes’ “99,95%”. A public incident log is more useful. The four largest providers’ status feeds, read on 14 October 2026, show:

Source: each provider’s public status page RSS feed (status.infura.io, status.alchemy.com, status.quicknode.com, status.chainstack.com), read 14 October 2026. Some QuickNode entries are scheduled maintenance with future dates.

Do not read these as a league table. Providers post at different levels of detail (QuickNode’s feed is dominated by announced client upgrades, Alchemy’s and Infura’s by degradations), and a provider that posts more incidents may simply be more transparent. What the logs do show is that every large provider has had degraded or partial-outage periods on major mainnets in the last six months, so production apps need a fallback endpoint.

The clearest historical example is Infura on 11 November 2020. Some of Infura’s components were pinned to an older Go-Ethereum (Geth) version that hit what Infura called “a critical consensus bug at block 11234873”, leaving its nodes on a minority chain. The Block reported that Binance and Bithumb paused ETH and ERC-20 withdrawals, MetaMask users had problems because Infura is its default provider, and QuickNode and Alchemy were working at the time. The lesson still applies in 2026: a single RPC dependency is a single point of failure, and a provider’s client version matters as much as its uptime figure.

The 13 blockchain API and RPC providers, reviewed

1. Alchemy

Alchemy is the broadest developer platform here: node RPC on “100+ chains” plus Token, Transfers, NFT, Portfolio and Prices APIs, webhooks, wallet and gas APIs, rollups and dedicated clusters.

• API types: JSON-RPC over HTTPS and WebSockets, trace, debug and simulation, enhanced data APIs, webhooks, Solana gRPC (from $75 per TB on pay as you go).
• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Free: 30M CU a month, 300 CU/s (15 req/s), 5 apps, 5 webhooks. Pay as you go: $0.525 per 1M CU, 10,000 CU/s (300 req/s) included, extra throughput $160 per 5,000 CU/s a month up to 30,000 CU/s. Enterprise: custom, with signed SLAs.
• Is Alchemy RPC free? Yes, up to 30M CU a month and 300 CU/s on the Free plan, across all mainnets and testnets it lists. At 26 CU per eth_call that is about 1.15 million calls a month.
• Compliance: its security page shows a “SOC 2 certification” image but does not state the type in text; ask for the report.
• Track record and what users say: homepage claims 99.99% uptime and lists Coinbase, Circle, Polymarket, Robinhood and Uniswap among its logos. Its status feed shows multi-network error incidents on 31 August and 3 September 2026. It acquired Bware Labs (Blast API), which has since been deprecated. Its JavaScript SDK (alchemy-sdk-js) was archived on 13 July 2026, with the repository recommending viem instead.
• Lock-in: high if you build on the enhanced APIs; low if you use only standard JSON-RPC. The SDK archiving is a reminder to call standard methods through a neutral library.
• Best for: EVM teams that want wallet balances, transfers and NFT data without running an indexer.

2. Infura

Infura is Consensys’s node service, now presented as “part of MetaMask” (MetaMask Developer). It is MetaMask’s default RPC provider, which makes it one of the most depended-on endpoints in Ethereum.

• What is Infura used for? Hosted JSON-RPC access to Ethereum and other networks (“40+ supported networks” on its pricing page) and IPFS, so apps and wallets can read the chain and send transactions without their own nodes.
• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Core: free, 3M credits a day, 500 credits/s, 1 API key, full archive data. Developer: $50 a month, 15M credits a day, 4,000 credits/s, adds Debug/Trace API. Team: $225 a month, 75M credits a day, 40,000 credits/s. Add-on: $200 a month for 55M extra credits. Enterprise: custom.
• Method weights: 80 credits for most reads including eth_call and eth_blockNumber, 255 for eth_getLogs, 1,000 for debug_traceTransaction.
• Compliance: no SOC 2 statement found on its homepage or pricing page as checked.
• Track record and what users say: the November 2020 outage above remains the best-documented RPC failure in Ethereum’s history. Its 2026 status feed shows an Ethereum Mainnet JSON-RPC partial outage on 27 May and degraded performance on 13 and 14 June. MetaMask’s privacy notice says that under default settings it processes your wallet address to provide features, with Infura as the default RPC provider; users who onboarded with a Secret Recovery Phrase can turn off “Basic Functionality” to opt out.
• Best for: Ethereum and L2 apps already in the MetaMask and Consensys stack, with modest, steady volumes that fit daily quotas.

3. QuickNode

QuickNode sells RPC, Streams (real-time data pipelines), webhooks, a marketplace of add-ons and dedicated clusters across “75+ chains” (its homepage), with the most explicit compliance paperwork of the large providers.

• What does QuickNode do? It runs managed endpoints on many chains, sells push-based data delivery (Streams, webhooks), and offers dedicated backends for high-volume customers.
• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): free trial: 1 month, 10M credits, 15 RPS, no card. Build $49 (80M credits, 50 RPS); Accelerate $249 (450M, 125 RPS); Scale $499 (950M, 250 RPS); Business $999 (2 billion, 500 RPS). Annual billing lowers each. Overage above $200 is billed immediately rather than at the end of the cycle.
• Method weights: 20 credits for standard methods on Ethereum, with a 2× multiplier for trace and debug and 4× for specialised calls.
• Compliance: Enterprise customers can request SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and DORA reports, per its pricing page. DORA is the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, relevant if you are an EU-regulated financial entity.
• Track record and what users say: homepage claims 99.99% uptime and “500B+” requests a month. An API authentication outage on 13 October 2026 affected Streams, KV Store and Webhooks for a small number of accounts, per its status page. It was reported as working during Infura’s 2020 outage.
• Best for: multi-chain teams that need streaming data and vendor due-diligence documents. On a free trial that ends after a month, plan your move to a paid tier before launch.

4. Chainstack

Chainstack is the clearest per-request pricing of the large providers: one request unit per call, two for archive, with flat-rate options.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Developer: free, 3M RU a month, 25 RPS, no archive or debug. Growth $49 (20M RU, 250 RPS); Pro $199 (80M, 400 RPS); Business $499 (200M, 600 RPS); Enterprise $990 (400M, unlimited RPS). Extra usage falls from $20 to $5 per 1M RU by tier. Unlimited Node from $149 a month at 25 RPS; dedicated nodes from $678 a month.
• Chains: the homepage says “70+ chains”; the pricing FAQ says “over 25+ protocols” on mainnet. Ask for your specific chain and archive depth.
• Compliance: claims SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001.
• Track record and what users say: homepage testimonials from Brave and Ronin. Its status feed for late September to mid-October 2026 shows Solana degradations on 5 and 6 October and Base lag on 30 September.
• Best for: teams whose cost model needs to be explainable to finance in one line, and archive-heavy reads.

5. Ankr

Ankr offers keyless public endpoints and cheap pay-as-you-go access on “70+ blockchains”, plus an Advanced API for indexed data.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Public: free, about 1,800 requests a minute. Freemium: 200M API credits a month after sign-in. Premium: pay as you go at $0.10 per 1M credits, $10 minimum deposit (or the equivalent in ANKR tokens), up to about 1,500 req/s per endpoint (about 4,000 on Solana). A 200-credit weight applies to each EVM request, 500 for Solana, 700 for Beacon chain and Advanced API calls.
• Track record and what users say: in December 2022 an attacker minted 20 trillion aBNBc, Ankr’s liquid-staking token on BNB Chain, and swapped them for more than $5 million (Cryptopotato, 4 December 2022). Ankr said “all infrastructure services are unaffected” and committed to compensating users. The incident hit its staking product, not its RPC service, but it is part of the company’s security record.
• Best for: prototypes and low-cost production reads across many chains, as a secondary endpoint behind a primary provider.

6. GetBlock

GetBlock covers “130+ supported chains” with shared, “Limitless” and dedicated nodes, and publishes dedicated-node pricing rather than hiding it behind sales.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): shared plans are priced by CU on a slider from 50K CU upwards; the displayed Pro tier is $399 a month billed yearly for 600M to 1B CU ($0.40 per 1M CU) at 800 RPS. Its comparison table lists support “from $49/mo” and public dedicated pricing “from $1,000”. Plans include WebSockets, MEV protection and archive data on selected networks. Endpoints in Frankfurt, New York and Singapore.
• Compliance: claims a SOC 2 Type II attestation; no auditor or scope is published on the pricing page.
• Track record and what users say: dedicated nodes are advertised with a “99.9%+” SLA. Its own comparison articles rank for this keyword, so treat its rankings as vendor content.
• Best for: teams that need a long-tail chain or want to price a dedicated node without a sales call.

7. dRPC

dRPC routes requests across “60+ RPC providers” rather than serving everything from its own fleet, which is the main structural answer to single-vendor risk in this list.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Free: 210M CU a month, 100 RPS, public nodes only. Growth: $6 per 1M requests flat, 5,000 RPS, “99.99% uptime” listed, frontrunning protection, crypto payments accepted. Enterprise: from 300M requests a month with an SLA.
• Coverage: “130+ chains across 232 networks” on its pricing page (other sections of its site give 150+ and 200+ networks).
• Open source: its NodeCore load balancer is MIT-licensed, and its Dshackle load balancer is public on GitHub under Apache 2.0, so you can run the routing layer yourself.
• Track record and what users say: SushiSwap testimonial on its homepage. A multi-provider network spreads outage risk but also means you rarely know which operator served a given request; ask how providers are vetted and what logs you get.
• Best for: teams that want a flat per-request price and built-in failover, or a second provider behind a primary.

8. BlockPI

BlockPI sells RPC, dedicated nodes, validator services and account-abstraction infrastructure on prepaid packages instead of monthly subscriptions.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Free: 50M RU every 32 days, 20 req/s and 400 RU/s, given monthly to registered users. Elementary $49 for 500M RU valid 60 days (1,000 req/s); Premium $299 for 4,000M RU valid 90 days (2,500 req/s); pay as you go $0.01 per 50,000 RU.
• Gaps: the pricing documentation does not publish RU weights per method or a chain count, so you cannot run the worked example above without its calculator.
• Track record and what users say: its homepage lists official RPC partnerships with chains including Conflux, Kaia and Merlin Chain.
• Best for: seasonal or bursty workloads where prepaid credits that last 60 to 90 days beat a monthly plan.

9. Moralis

Moralis is primarily a data API company: Wallet, Token, NFT and Streams APIs, with RPC nodes included in every plan.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026, billed annually): Starter $149 a month (2M CU, 40 RPS); Pro $249 (100M CU, 80 RPS); Business $749 (500M CU, 200 RPS); Enterprise custom. RPC node throughput is capped separately at 100 to 300 CU/s below Enterprise. No free plan is shown on the pricing page, although sign-up is described as “Create a free account”.
• Coverage: “50+ Chains” on the homepage; its Chains menu lists 25.
• Compliance: states “SOC 2 Type II Certified” and ISO 27001 compliance.
• Track record and what users say: testimonials on its site from Blockchain.com, Polygon and MetaMask.
• Best for: wallet and portfolio apps that need decoded balances, transfers and PnL more than raw RPC. Treat it as a data vendor and keep a separate RPC provider if node throughput matters.

10. Tatum

Tatum combines an RPC gateway, data API, notifications and MPC wallets behind an SDK, aimed at teams that want one library across many protocols.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Free: 100K lifetime credits (not monthly), 3 RPS, 2 API keys, testnet-only gas coverage. Its homepage banner shows a $49 a month plan, discounted to $25 a month on a two-year commitment. Dedicated API keys from $99 a month (10 RPS) to $1,049 (100 RPS). Crypto payment is listed as “currently” in progress.
• Coverage: “100+ protocols” and “130+ blockchains” on the same homepage; the list shown on the page has 68.
• Compliance: homepage shows AICPA SOC and ISO 27001 badges; the SOC report type is not stated in text.
• Track record and what users say: testimonials from Binance, Celo and Zengo. Its tatum-js SDK is public under MIT with about 400 stars.
• Best for: small teams building wallets or payment flows across several chains through one SDK. The lifetime free credits are for evaluation only.

11. NOWNodes

NOWNodes, run by Tech Castle OÜ in Tallinn, Estonia, offers shared and dedicated nodes on “+120” networks, with block explorers for UTXO chains such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Start (free) 100,000 requests a month, 1 API key, no WebSocket; Pro 1M; Pro Plus 10M; Business 30M; Business Plus 50M; Enterprise 100M requests a month. Overage from €5 to €0.50 per 100,000 requests. Monthly prices were not shown as text on the pricing page when checked.
• Track record and what users say: claims 99.95% API uptime and a 3-minute support response on every plan. No public SOC 2 or ISO claim was found on its homepage or pricing page.
• Best for: exchanges and payment processors that need Bitcoin-family nodes and explorers alongside EVM chains.

12. Helius

Helius is Solana-only: RPC, transaction sending (Sender, preconfirmations), LaserStream gRPC streaming, webhooks, the DAS API for tokens, NFTs and compressed assets, and validator services. A banner on its homepage (checked 14 October 2026) announces that it has acquired Light Protocol.

• Pricing (checked 14 October 2026): Free: 1M credits, 10 RPS, 1 sendTransaction/s. Developer $49 (10M credits, 50 RPS); Business $499 (100M, 200 RPS, gRPC); Professional $999 (200M, 500 RPS). Overage $5 per million credits on paid plans.
• Compliance: states “SOC 2 certified infrastructure”; no report date or scope published on the homepage.
• Track record and what users say: names Phantom, Jupiter, DFlow, Coinbase and Bitwise as users. Its helius-sdk is public under MIT. For the wallet side of Solana, see the site’s review of whether Phantom wallet is safe.
• Best for: Solana apps, bots and indexers that need streaming and fast transaction landing more than multi-chain reach.

13. Blockdaemon

Blockdaemon is the institutional option: dedicated nodes, native RPC, institutional staking, validators and an MPC wallet stack, sold through contracts rather than self-serve plans.

• Pricing: none published; “talk to our team” only (checked 14 October 2026).
• Compliance: homepage shows AICPA SOC and ISO 27001 badges and links to a Trust Center.
• Track record and what users say: its homepage features DTCC Tokenization Services and use cases for brokers, wealth managers and banks tokenising deposits. It shows logos of large financial institutions but does not label them as clients, so ask for references.
• Best for: banks, brokers and custodians that need nodes, staking and key management from one vendor under a negotiated SLA.

Alchemy vs Infura vs QuickNode

These three get compared most often, and the short answer is that they fit different workloads rather than one being better:

All checked 14 October 2026 from each provider’s pricing page and method-weight documentation.

Alchemy vs Infura: Alchemy is the better fit if you need indexed token and NFT data; Infura if you want plain Ethereum JSON-RPC from the MetaMask stack and your traffic fits daily quotas. Alchemy vs QuickNode: QuickNode’s flat 20-credit weight makes heavy methods such as eth_getLogs relatively cheap, while Alchemy’s free tier lasts indefinitely rather than a month.

Which Ethereum RPC provider is best?

There is no single best one, and any page that names one is usually written by a provider. On the evidence above, as of 14 October 2026:

• Read-heavy dApp backend on a budget: Chainstack (1 RU per call) or dRPC (flat $6 per 1M requests).
• Indexer or event-heavy workload: QuickNode or Chainstack, where eth_getLogs is not weighted up.
• Wallet or portfolio app: Alchemy or Moralis for indexed balances and transfers.
• Solana: Helius, with Chainstack or QuickNode as a second endpoint.
• Bitcoin-family chains: NOWNodes or GetBlock.
• Regulated institution: Blockdaemon, or QuickNode and Chainstack where SOC 2 and ISO reports are needed.
• Minimal single-vendor risk: dRPC as a router, or any two providers behind your own fallback logic.

How do you get an RPC endpoint?

1. Sign up with a provider and create an app or endpoint for your chain and network (mainnet or a testnet such as Sepolia).
2. Copy the HTTPS URL (and the WSS URL if you need subscriptions). The API key is usually part of the URL, so treat it as a secret: keep it server-side or restrict it by domain or IP where the provider allows.
3. Test it with a cheap method such as eth_blockNumber (10 CU at Alchemy, 80 credits at Infura).
4. Add a second provider’s URL as a fallback in your client library before you go to production.
5. Set usage alerts. QuickNode, for example, bills overage immediately once it passes $200.

Red flags to check before you commit

• Unit prices without method weights: a price per million units means nothing until you know the weight of your most-used method. BlockPI and GetBlock do not publish full weight tables on their pricing pages.
• Daily quotas on spiky traffic: Infura’s credits reset daily, so a launch day can exhaust a plan that looks large enough per month.
• Single-provider dependency: the November 2020 Infura outage paused withdrawals at major exchanges. Every large provider’s 2026 status feed shows partial outages on major mainnets.
• Proprietary APIs in your core path: enhanced APIs, streams and SDKs do not port. Alchemy’s JavaScript SDK was archived in July 2026; Blast API was shut down after its acquisition.
• Compliance badges without reports: a “SOC” image on a homepage is not a SOC 2 Type II report. Ask for the report, the period it covers and the auditor.
• Security record beyond RPC: Ankr’s December 2022 aBNBc exploit hit its staking product, not its RPC service, but it is still part of the company’s record. Check a vendor’s full incident history, not only its RPC status page.
• Privacy: your RPC provider sees every address and call your app sends. MetaMask’s privacy notice says wallet addresses are processed under default settings with Infura as default RPC. If that matters to your users, check each provider’s logging and retention terms.

What this means for you

As of 14 October 2026, the practical way to choose a blockchain API is to start from your own request log: count calls by method, price that mix with each provider’s published weights, check the throughput limit on the plan that results, and only then compare features. Keep your core reads and writes on standard JSON-RPC through a neutral client library so you can switch, run at least two providers in production, and ask for SOC 2 or ISO reports in writing if your customers will ask you for them. This page is reviewed monthly, and sooner if a provider named here has a major outage, changes its pricing units or shuts down a product.

All node and data provider write-ups live in Node & RPC Infrastructure. If you are hiring a team to build on top of these providers, read how to vet a blockchain development studio, and for the contract side of your stack, what a smart contract audit actually covers. For the wallet that depends on Infura by default, see whether MetaMask is safe.