Relayer Networks vs. In-App Paymasters

Decoupled, competitive market: Relayers like Biconomy, Gelato, and Pimlico operate as independent, specialized services. This creates a competitive landscape that drives innovation in bundling, speed, and fee optimization. This matters for teams that want to outsource complexity and leverage best-in-class infrastructure without vendor lock-in.

Multi-chain & multi-standard support: Professional relayers are built to handle diverse user operations (ERC-4337, native meta-transactions) across multiple chains (Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum). This matters for protocols launching on multiple L2s or needing to support both smart accounts and legacy EOAs seamlessly.

Fixed, predictable operational cost: By running your own paymaster (e.g., using Alchemy's Account Kit, ZeroDev SDK), you pay only for gas plus a small overhead, avoiding third-party relayer profit margins. This matters for high-volume dApps where gas sponsorship is a core product feature and marginal cost savings are critical.

Full control over sponsorship rules: Implement complex, app-specific logic for who pays gas, using any on-chain or off-chain data. You control the user experience end-to-end. This matters for subscription models, credit systems, or enterprise applications where gas policies are a key differentiator.

Your priority is speed to market and operational simplicity. You want:

• Zero infrastructure overhead for bundler and paymaster nodes.
• Automatic failover and redundancy handled by the network.
• To iterate quickly without managing smart contract upgrades and node ops.

Ideal for: Startups, hackathon projects, or teams lacking dedicated DevOps.

Your priority is long-term unit economics and deep customization. You need:

• Absolute control over gas sponsorship logic and user eligibility.
• To scale to millions of transactions while minimizing per-tx cost.
• To integrate gas payment directly into your app's token or points system.

Ideal for: Established protocols, consumer apps with viral growth, and enterprise B2B solutions.

Decentralized Infrastructure: Leverages a competitive network of independent operators (e.g., Gelato, Biconomy, OpenZeppelin Defender). This provides resilience against single points of failure and censorship. This matters for protocols requiring high uptime guarantees and permissionless access.

Developer Abstraction & Speed: Handles gas sponsorship, nonce management, and transaction simulation. Services like Etherspot's Skandha bundler or Stackup's Paymaster allow devs to integrate with a single SDK, reducing time-to-market from weeks to days for account abstraction features.

Cost & Fee Markets: Introduces an additional service fee layer (e.g., 5-10% on top of base gas). For high-volume dApps, this creates significant, variable operational costs that scale with user activity, unlike a fixed engineering cost for an in-house solution.

Protocol Dependency & Control: Your user experience is tied to the relayer's performance and policies. If a major network like Pimlico experiences downtime or changes its fee model, your dApp is directly impacted, reducing control over the end-to-end transaction flow.

Full Control & Predictable Cost: You manage the gas subsidy logic, sponsorship rules, and signer keys. This allows for custom business logic (e.g., free mints for NFT holders, session keys) and converts gas costs into a predictable, auditable CAPEX/OPEX line item.

Optimized Gas Efficiency: By running your own bundler (e.g., Stackup's reference implementation) and paymaster, you can implement batch optimizations and direct RPC connections, potentially achieving lower effective costs per transaction than a generalized relayer network at scale.

Operational Overhead & Risk: Requires a dedicated team to manage infrastructure, monitoring, signer security, and gas wallet replenishment. This introduces DevOps burden and smart contract risk, as seen in incidents requiring paymaster contract upgrades.

Limited Redundancy: Your in-house system is a single point of failure. An outage in your bundler or a bug in your paymaster logic can halt all sponsored transactions, directly impacting user experience, unlike a distributed relayer network.

Outsourced infrastructure: Leverage services like Biconomy, OpenZeppelin Defender, or Gelato to handle gas sponsorship, bundling, and nonce management. This matters for teams wanting to launch quickly without deep blockchain ops expertise, as these networks manage node reliability and uptime.

Unified API across chains: A single integration point (e.g., Biconomy's SDK) can sponsor transactions on Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, and others. This matters for multi-chain dApps that need consistent user experience without building custom paymaster logic for each chain.

Recurring fees & vendor lock-in: Pay a premium (e.g., 5-10% on top of gas) for the service, and your user flow depends on a third party's uptime. This matters for cost-sensitive or high-volume applications where margins are thin, and for teams who prioritize infrastructure control.

Custom sponsorship logic: Deploy your own ERC-4337 paymaster contract (e.g., using Pimlico's SDK or Stackup) to implement complex rules like whitelists, subscription models, or token-based fee payment. This matters for protocols needing unique monetization or access control tightly coupled to their app logic.

Eliminate middleman margins: After the initial development cost, you pay only for gas and your own infrastructure. For dApps with predictable, high transaction volume, this can lead to significant savings versus a relayer's percentage fee.

In-house DevOps burden: You are responsible for deploying, funding, monitoring, and securing your paymaster contracts and relayers. This matters for smaller teams or MVPs where developer time is a scarcer resource than capital, introducing risks of downtime or fund depletion.