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

Solana RPC is priced and limited differently from every EVM chain. There is no eth_call-style default: each method has its own weight on most providers, getProgramAccounts is restricted almost everywhere, and transaction history older than a day or two depends on whether the node can reach long-term storage. Two providers can quote the same plan price and differ by four times on your actual workload.

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 ones that count against us.

Solana on an RPC endpoint, measured

• Slot time: 0.27 s per slot over the last 1,000 and 10,000 slots (from getBlockTime, skipped slots included); nodes reported solana-core 4.3.0
• Commitment lag: finalized trailed processed by 32 slots, about 8.5 seconds, in 5 of 5 batched samples; confirmed trailed by 0 to 1
• Blockhash lifetime: getLatestBlockhash returned a lastValidBlockHeight 145 blocks past the finalized block height, so a signed transaction has under a minute to land
• History: getBlock 1,000 and 100,000 slots back always answered. Further back it depended on which upstream served the call: 1,000,000 slots back 4 of 5, 3,000,000 back 2 of 5, and a November 2024 block 6 of 10. Our archive=1 routing is EVM-only, so on our route deep Solana history needs retries
• Method limits: getSignaturesForAddress max 1,000 per page; getMultipleAccounts max 100 accounts; getProgramAccounts worked 5 of 5 times with a memcmp filter and was refused without one; getLargestAccounts disabled; getTokenLargestAccounts hit a per-method rate limit
• WebSocket: subscriptions work on our Solana route (measured in the weekly WebSocket probe)

The providers at a glance

Chainstack's limits page lists getProgramAccounts as paid-plan only, with per-method rate limits that tighten as the program grows.

What 100M requests a month cost

Assumptions: standard reads (getAccountInfo, getBalance, getSlot, getLatestBlockhash), no getProgramAccounts and no deep history.

The Solana-specific point is method weight. History calls cost more almost everywhere: getTransaction, getBlock and getSignaturesForAddress are 40 CU on Alchemy (four times getAccountInfo), archival calls are 10 credits on Helius, and older blocks are 2 RU on Chainstack. An explorer or wallet backend that is mostly history lookups can cost several times the table above on metered plans. Flat-rate billing doesn't change with the method.

Picking by workload

Trading bots. Landing transactions matters more than read price. Solana specialists such as Helius sell low-latency data products beyond plain RPC (Helius lists shred delivery on its pricing page); we don't, and for that workload a specialist is worth its price.

Wallets and explorers. Mostly getSignaturesForAddress and getTransaction, often for old activity. Confirm full-history coverage in writing; on our route it is not guaranteed today.

Indexers using getProgramAccounts. Check the provider's rules before you design around it: filters required, per-program rate limits, and on some plans not available at all. Always send memcmp/dataSize filters and a dataSlice when you only need keys.

Steady account reads at volume. Balance and account polling at high request counts is where flat rate wins clearly. For many accounts, use getMultipleAccounts (up to 100 per call) or WebSocket subscriptions instead of polling one by one.

The free public endpoints

Our weekly public-endpoint test covers EVM chains only, so for Solana we spot-checked a few public endpoints once on October 6 from a single location. The official api.mainnet.solana.com and api.mainnet-beta.solana.com answered; the latter also served a November 2024 block and a filtered getProgramAccounts. Solana's docs cap the public mainnet endpoint at 100 requests per 10 seconds per IP and 40 per method, and say public endpoints are not intended for production. solana-rpc.publicnode.com answered but kept about a day of blocks and refused getProgramAccounts; several other listed endpoints required a key or returned 429. More on handling those limits is in Solana RPC 429 errors.

Prices change often; these were taken from each provider's pricing page on October 6, 2026: Helius, Alchemy (CU costs), QuickNode (credits), Chainstack (limits), Infura (credit costs), dRPC. Public endpoint limits are from Solana's cluster docs. For Solana RPC usage in depth, see Solana RPC: A Developer's Guide.

SwiftNodes serves Solana over HTTPS and WebSocket at one flat monthly price, under the same key as every other chain we serve. Endpoints are on the Solana RPC page, and SwiftNodes has a free tier to try it.