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

OP Mainnet is the easiest major L2 to get started on and one of the more pleasant ones to run against: 2-second blocks, full Ethereum tooling, and tracing that mostly works. What separates providers is how much history they serve, how wide a log query they accept, and how they bill the extra calls an L2 indexer makes.

This compares seven providers with prices checked on their pricing pages on October 6, 2026. We run one of them (SwiftNodes); its limits below were measured the same day, including the unflattering ones.

Optimism on an RPC endpoint, measured

• Block time: 2.0 s (1,000-block average), 43,200 blocks a day
• Finality: finalized trails the head by about 605 to 617 blocks, roughly 20 minutes, because it follows Ethereum L1 finality (the weekly probe on October 4 saw 889 blocks, about 30 minutes)
• eth_getLogs: 5,000-block cap per call on our route (6 of 6 succeeded; 10,000 was refused), about 2.8 hours of chain time
• State depth: reads 1,000,000 blocks back answered; eth_getCode at block 110,000,000 (September 2023, after the Bedrock upgrade) answered 6 of 6 times, and a single check at pre-Bedrock block 100,000,000 answered too
• Tracing: trace_block, trace_transaction, trace_filter, debug_traceTransaction and debug_traceCall (with a tracer) all answered in our spot checks
• Fees: eth_gasPrice returned about 0.001 gwei and eth_maxPriorityFeePerGas 0.001 gwei; on OP Stack the L1 data fee is usually the larger part of what a transaction costs

The providers at a glance

What 100M requests a month cost

Assumptions: eth_call-class reads at each provider's published per-call weight. Infura does not publish a separate Optimism table; its docs say networks without their own values use the Ethereum credit costs.

The Optimism-specific point: you are rarely buying for one OP Stack chain. Teams that deploy on OP Mainnet usually deploy on Base, and often on other OP Stack chains too, so check which of them your provider serves under the same key and plan. Within OP Mainnet alone, following every block is modest (about 1.3 million eth_getBlockReceipts calls a month), so log scans and backfills, not head-following, are what drive the bill.

Picking by workload

Indexers. Look at the per-call log range and at receipts. On our route 5,000 blocks per eth_getLogs call means about 9 calls per day of history; Dwellir lists 10,000 blocks on Growth and Scale, Chainstack 10,000 on Growth and 100 on its free plan. eth_getBlockReceipts is supported on our route.

Tracing and debugging. OP Mainnet serves both trace_* and debug_* on our route, which is not true of every L2 (Arbitrum Nitro, for example, only serves the debug_* tracers). If you trace heavily, compare per-method weight: Dwellir and Chainstack charge the same for a trace as for a balance read, and flat-rate billing doesn't change with the method.

Pre-Bedrock history. OP Mainnet's history before the June 2023 Bedrock upgrade came from a different client. If you need state or traces from that era, ask the provider how it serves it before you commit.

Low-volume apps. Alchemy's 30M CU free tier (about 1.1 million average calls a month) or dRPC's free public nodes at 100 req/s cover a lot before any bill.

The free public endpoints

We test public Optimism endpoints weekly from Europe. In the latest run 15 of 34 HTTP endpoints answered correctly; the official mainnet.optimism.io answered in 35 ms with 10,000-block log ranges and state 1,000,000 blocks back, while three working endpoints could not read state even 128 blocks back. The full list is on our public Optimism RPC page.

Prices change often; these were taken from each provider's pricing page on October 6, 2026: Alchemy, QuickNode (credits), Chainstack (limits), Infura (credit costs), dRPC, Dwellir. For OP Mainnet's RPC behaviour in depth, see Optimism RPC: The Chain That Became a Template; the same comparison for Base is in Best Base RPC Providers.

SwiftNodes serves OP Mainnet over HTTPS and WebSocket, with Base and other OP Stack chains under the same key, at one flat monthly price. Endpoints and measured method support are on the Optimism RPC page, and SwiftNodes has a free tier to try it.