Daily competitor monitoring — 2026-09-13
Criterion of the day: Pricing, packaging, credits and rate limits (pricing-packaging) Scope: 15 tracked providers; official public pages only. Outcome: no defensible day-over-day list-price increase/decrease was established. The durable comparison was corrected where current official pages contradicted stale cells and was expanded where current packaging became distinguishable.
Executive takeaways
- Infura: current official pricing states Core / Developer / Team quotas of 3M / 15M / 75M credits per day and throughput of 500 / 4K / 40K credits per second. With
eth_blockNumberat 80 credits, Developer normalizes to ≈187,500 requests/day, ≈50 RPS and $8.89 per 1M included requests at full utilization. This replaces stale 6M-credit/day and 12.5-RPS assumptions. - dRPC: the Free tier currently shows 210M CU/month and 100 requests/s. At 20 CU for the reference method, ≈10.5M requests/month remains the valid normalized allowance; the old 10-RPS cell was corrected.
- Pocket Network / Grove: Grove is winding down, but that does not mean Pocket has no current access offer. Pocket Foundation advertises free no-key public APIs plus partnership/dedicated access, including a $1/1B-CU anchor. This stays partial, because request weights, support scope and commercial/payment mechanics are not sufficiently public for apples-to-apples normalization.
- NOWNodes / Tatum: NOWNodes now visibly exposes tier-dependent overage values (€5, €1 and €0.50 per 100k requests), but flattened extraction does not safely map every value to a plan. Tatum advertises 50% off for a two-year term. Both are useful sales signals but too volatile/ambiguous to quote without a rendered-page or checkout recheck.
Changed matrix cells
| Provider | Cells changed | Previous view | Current view / rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infura | Included usage; overage; rate limit; normalized price; caveat | Developer ≈75k ref req/day, ≈12.5 RPS, $22.22/1M; fixed add-on cited | Developer ≈187.5k/day, ≈50 RPS, $8.89/1M. Live page says 15M credits/day and 4K credits/s; universal Extra Credits rate not confirmed in this capture. |
| dRPC | Rate limit; caveat | Free 10 RPS | Free 100 RPS on current pricing page; 210M CU/month confirms the existing ≈10.5M reference-request conversion. |
| Pocket Network / Grove | Status; free; paid; included; rate; enterprise; normalization; notes; sources | Row marked stale and treated all current service as sunset | partial: Grove wind-down and Pocket Foundation's current public/partnership offers are represented separately. $1/1B CU remains non-normalizable without method weights. |
| NOWNodes | Overage; caveat | No public overage verified | Current page extraction contains €5/€1/€0.50 per 100k overage values; plan mapping flagged for visual confirmation. |
| Tatum | Paid-plan packaging; caveat | Starter $49/mo | Same base price; added current 50%-off two-year promotional signal and volatility warning. |
Cross-provider normalized snapshot
Reference unit is 1M eth_blockNumber-equivalent Ethereum JSON-RPC requests. Bundle numbers assume all included usage is consumed.
| Provider | Comparable public price | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Chainstack | $2.45/1M bundle; $15/1M overage | Lowest verified full-use starter bundle in this tracked set; overage economics differ sharply. |
| Alchemy | $5.25/1M PAYG | Clean marginal price at first public tier; method multipliers apply. |
| dRPC | $6/1M | Growth price is directly request-denominated; free allowance converts at 20 CU/reference call. |
| Infura | $8.89/1M bundle | Corrected Developer effective rate based on 15M credits/day and 30-day month. |
| QuickNode | $12.25/1M bundle; $12.40/1M overage | Included and marginal rates are close for the Build tier. |
| Ankr | $20/1M | Premium effective/marginal rate for standard EVM calls at 200 credits each. |
| NOWNodes | $20/1M bundle | Direct-request Pro bundle; overage tier mapping requires UI confirmation. |
| Tatum | $24.50/1M bundle | Base Starter economics; promotional two-year discount excluded from normalized durable rate. |
| Moralis, Blast API, Blockdaemon, Pocket/Grove, LlamaRPC, Allnodes, Lava | N/A | Public data is quote-only, unlimited, free-only, dynamically rendered or lacks a defensible reference-method conversion. |
Diff triage: signal vs noise
- QuickNode homepage/chains deltas were navigation/content changes; no verified pricing implication.
- Allnodes homepage/pricing deltas included marketing or unrelated market metrics; no verified plan-price movement.
- Alchemy, Chainstack, Ankr and the remaining unchanged rows retain their last official verified values; absence of a detected diff is not evidence of contractual price stability.
Implications for GetBlock
Sales
- Lead with a transparent calculator that separates included effective cost, marginal overage, method weight and throughput. Competitor headline credits conceal materially different economics.
- Use Pocket/Grove carefully in battlecards: “Grove winding down” is accurate, “Pocket access is gone” is not.
- Never quote NOWNodes' exact tier overage or Tatum's term promotion without same-day visual verification.
Product marketing
- Publish a request-method translator and show standard,
eth_call, trace/debug and archive-heavy scenarios side by side. - Position predictable overage and burst limits as first-class packaging attributes; Chainstack's low bundle rate but much higher overage illustrates why both columns matter.
- Keep shared RPC, dedicated RPC, true archive, indexer and partnership-funded public endpoints as separate product classes.
Content
- Create a methodology page explaining why CU/credit totals cannot be compared until method weights are known.
- Build an “effective bundle vs marginal overage” comparison using current official sources and dated evidence.
- Cover the Grove/Pocket distinction as a market-structure story, not a simplistic provider shutdown item.
Limitations
Public webpages can be geo-, currency-, login- or JavaScript-dependent. No third-party cached price was promoted to current truth. USD/EUR values are left in source currency where conversion would add false precision. Enterprise SLA, support, dedicated isolation, archive/history, egress and taxes are outside the normalized shared-RPC unit.
Durable artifact updated
The cumulative 15-provider matrix and its source-backed JSON were consolidated on 2026-09-13. This daily report records only today's corrections, clarifications and diff triage; it does not replace the topic matrix.