Ankr vs Alchemy: Staking-Based vs Fiat Pricing Models

Staking-based pricing: Pay with ANKR tokens for compute units, decoupling costs from volatile gas fees. This matters for budget-conscious startups and dApps with predictable, steady traffic where cost certainty is critical. Ideal for projects like Axelar or Polygon zkEVM that need stable operational overhead.

Pay-as-you-go gas model: Costs scale directly with on-chain activity and request volume. This matters for high-growth applications and enterprise-grade protocols like OpenSea and Aave that require maximum reliability, advanced tooling (Supernode, Transfers API), and can absorb variable costs for superior performance.

Deep staking integration: Holding and staking ANKR tokens provides up to 50% discounts on RPC services. This matters for token-aligned projects and long-term builders looking to reduce infrastructure spend while participating in the provider's ecosystem governance and rewards.

Fiat and stablecoin billing: Pay in USD, avoiding exposure to provider token volatility. This matters for institutional clients and traditional enterprises requiring straightforward accounting, predictable fiat-denominated bills, and no mandatory token economics involvement.

Your priorities are cost predictability and token synergy. You are a bootstrapped project, a node operator leveraging Ankr's distributed network, or building a dApp where locking ANKR for long-term discounts aligns with your treasury strategy.

Your priorities are absolute performance, developer experience, and enterprise support. You are scaling a top-tier DeFi protocol or NFT platform, need advanced APIs and analytics, and have the budget to pay for industry-leading reliability and tools.

Direct token utility: Staking ANKR tokens provides up to a 50% discount on RPC requests. This creates a direct economic link between service usage and the native token's ecosystem. This matters for protocols with their own token or teams willing to hold and stake for long-term operational savings, effectively turning a cost center into a potential appreciating asset.

Capital exposure and complexity: Savings are tied to the ANKR token's market price, introducing budget volatility risk. Staking requires locking capital that could be deployed elsewhere. This matters for enterprise finance teams who require predictable, fiat-denominated quarterly budgets and cannot manage the operational overhead of crypto treasury management for core infrastructure.

Enterprise-grade cost control: Pay per Compute Unit (CU) with transparent, fiat-based pricing tiers (Growth, Scale, Enterprise). This provides clear, predictable scaling costs without exposure to crypto asset volatility. This matters for publicly traded companies or large-scale dApps like OpenSea or 0x that need precise financial forecasting and GAAP-compliant expense reporting.

Purely transactional relationship: Costs are an opaque expense with no mechanism for community or economic participation. High-volume users miss out on potential value accrual models available in token-based ecosystems. This matters for DAO-funded projects or newer L1/L2 chains seeking to deeply integrate their tokenomics with core infrastructure providers to bootstrap network effects and shared growth.

Predictable budgeting: Fixed monthly costs based on request tiers (e.g., Growth tier at $49/month). This matters for enterprise finance teams who require stable, auditable OpEx and cannot manage volatile token-based expenses.

Cost inefficiency at scale: Pay-per-request pricing leads to escalating bills with user growth. For a high-TPS dApp like a major NFT marketplace, costs can exceed $10K/month with no native mechanism to offset them via network participation.

Cost offset via rewards: Users stake ANKR tokens to run nodes, earning staking rewards that can partially or fully subsidize RPC costs. This creates a circular economy where infrastructure usage aligns with protocol growth.

Exposure to token volatility: Budgets are tied to ANKR's market price and staking APR. This matters for public companies or regulated entities that must report stable costs and avoid treasury management complexities from crypto assets.