Rivet’s expanded free tier, and how it stacks up against competing Ethereum node infrastructure services.
By: Greg Lang
Tags: Developer Tools, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Blockchain, Infrastructure

Rivet’s expanded free tier, and how it stacks up against competing Ethereum node infrastructure services.

On November 16, 2020, Rivet announced an increase in our free offering. Starting on that date, all accounts created using an email address—in the past or future—get 3,000,000 free requests each month.

While clearly this is a major increase from our previous offering of 500,000 requests per month, you may be wondering how this stacks up compared to other competing services. In this post, we’ll be making just that comparison.

Competing Services

For purposes of this article, we’ll be comparing Rivet to all services that offer a free tier of service. While other factors may come into play when it comes to differentiating between services or deciding which one is best for different projects to use, when it comes to getting started, the generosity of the free tier of service is a major factor developers will want to take into account.

Bearing that in mind, here are the services that we’re going to be comparing to Rivet in this article: Alchemy, Quiknode, and Infura.

Alchemy

TLDR: WTF is a compute unit?

10,000,000 of a thing sounds like a lot. But with Alchemy, you get 10,000,000 “compute units” a month.

How many compute units is in one request? Good question—but it most likely depends on what that request includes. But we have no way to gain any insight into the answer to that question based on the information provided.

The bottom line? If your use case calls for 100,000 requests per day, and each request averages out to 4 or more compute units, then you’re going to need more than Alchemy’s free tier to make it through the month.

Will that be you? Who knows?

With Rivet, you get 3,000,000 free requests per month—regardless of what kind of request you’re making. With Alchemy, it depends….

Verdict: Advantage Rivet

Quiknode

With Quiknode, you don’t get a free tier—you get a free trial of their $9.00/month plan—which offers 300,000 calls per month.

Verdict: Advantage Rivet

Infura

Finally, with Infura, you get 100,000 requests per day. While this adds up to 3,000,000 requests per month, if you ever need more than 100,000 in one day, you’ll need to pay for the next tier up.

With Rivet, you get 3,000,000 requests per month. If you want to use 1.5 million of them on day 1 and spread the remainder out across the next 29 days—no worries, you do you.

So while the overall number of free requests you get in a month is technically the same, Rivet gives it to you without limitations on daily use.

Verdict: Advantage Rivet

Conclusion

If you’re looking for the most generous free plan of any other competing service, look no further than Rivet. With Rivet, you get a no-surprises, no-daily-limits 3,000,000 requests a month. If that’s not enough, you’ll only pay $1 per 100,000 additional requests—and you pay only for what you use.

(And if you pre-pay with ETH or DAI, you can get up to 15% off beyond even that!)

For these reasons, we feel confident when we say that Rivet has the best free tier on 🌎.