Best Base RPC Providers (2026): Pricing, Free Tiers and Limits Compared

Base is one of the busiest Ethereum layer 2s, and most RPC providers now serve it. They are not interchangeable: they meter differently (compute units, credits, responses, flat rate), cap free tiers differently, and the same 100 million requests can cost anywhere from $49 to about $1,500 a month.

This is a comparison of eight providers on the numbers that decide a bill, with every price checked on the provider's own pricing page on October 3, 2026. We sell Base RPC ourselves, so treat the SwiftNodes rows with that in mind; the limits we list for SwiftNodes are measured, including the ones that count against us.

Base basics

• Chain ID: 8453 (mainnet), 84532 (Base Sepolia)
• Gas token: ETH
• Block time: 2.0 s (measured over 1,000 blocks)
• Finality: the finalized tag trails the head by about 742 blocks, roughly 25 minutes (measured); use safe or finalized for anything that moves money
• Public endpoint: https://mainnet.base.org, rate-limited, no SLA

The eight providers at a glance

What 30M and 100M requests a month cost

The billing units above make headline prices hard to compare, so here is the same workload priced on each. Assumptions: eth_call-class reads (eth_call, eth_getBalance, eth_getTransactionReceipt), Alchemy's published 27 CU average, Coinbase's 30 BU average, QuickNode's flat 20 credits per call on Base, and Infura's 80 credits per eth_call. Log-heavy traffic costs more on the credit-weighted providers (Infura charges 255 credits for eth_getLogs).

Two things this table hides. First, flat-rate pricing caps your rate, not your volume: 100M requests a month averages 38.6 requests per second, but real traffic has peaks, and the plan has to cover the peak. Second, metered plans cap your volume, not your rate, which suits spiky but low-volume apps better than steady ones.

Picking by workload

Steady, high-volume reads (indexers, backends, bots polling every block). Volume is the cost driver, so per-request billing hurts. Flat rate (SwiftNodes) or 1-credit-per-call plans (Dwellir, Chainstack) are cheapest. Check log limits before committing: on our Base route eth_getLogs is capped at 5,000 blocks per call (measured); Dwellir publishes a 10,000-block range on its Growth and Scale plans. Our eth_getLogs page for Base has the details.

Traces and debugging. If you need trace_* or debug_traceCall on Base, SwiftNodes is the wrong pick today: neither measured as available on our Base upstreams in the latest weekly probe (see trace_block on Base). Dwellir lists trace and debug APIs on every paid plan; for the others, check their Base method list before you commit, because trace support varies by chain and plan.

Spiky, low-volume apps (wallets, dashboards, early-stage dApps). Metered free tiers go furthest here. Alchemy's 30M CU is about 1.1 million average calls a month at 25 requests per second; dRPC's free tier allows 100 requests per second on public nodes. You pay nothing until volume grows.

Products beyond RPC. Alchemy (NFT and token APIs, webhooks), QuickNode (Streams and marketplace add-ons) and Coinbase CDP (wallets, onramps and paymaster around Base) sell platforms, not just nodes. If you will use those products, compare on the platform, not on RPC price.

Many chains on one key, crypto payment, no KYC. This is what SwiftNodes is built for: one key across 125+ chains, card or crypto, no identity checks. Dwellir also accepts crypto on every plan now.

The free public endpoints

We test public Base endpoints every week from a server in Europe (latency is from there; your numbers will differ by region). In the latest run 21 HTTP endpoints answered correctly and about 20 more failed, were rate-limited or have been shut down. Among the working ones, mainnet.base.org answered in 113 ms, base-rpc.publicnode.com in 30 ms and base.drpc.org in 33 ms, and their eth_getLogs and historical-state limits differ widely. The full measured list is on our public Base RPC page.

Public endpoints are fine for development and occasional reads. They are rate-limited, carry no SLA, and change without notice, which is exactly what you don't want under production traffic.

How to choose in an afternoon

1. Estimate your monthly requests and your peak requests per second; the first prices metered plans, the second prices flat-rate ones.
2. Sign up for two or three free tiers from the table.
3. Point a slice of real traffic at each for a few days and compare p95 latency, error rate and the usage dashboard.
4. Check the limits you depend on: eth_getLogs range, trace/debug support, WebSocket subscriptions, archive depth.

Prices change often; every figure here was taken from the providers' pricing pages on October 3, 2026: Alchemy, QuickNode and its credit table, Chainstack, Infura, dRPC, Dwellir and Coinbase CDP.

SwiftNodes serves Base over HTTPS and WebSocket on every plan, with archive routing on paid plans and one flat monthly price. Endpoints, live block height and measured method support are on the Base RPC page, and SwiftNodes has a free tier to try it.