Choosing an RPC Provider for a Robinhood Chain Wallet
I spent a day hunting for an RPC provider for a wallet I’m building (ok, I’ll be honest. It’s an AI PoC so far … but I’ll share more in a future post) for Robinhood Chain. I tested four that I could try for free, and blockmachine came out on top for our setup: fastest from Europe, where indexing runs, and cheapest at our volume. Here is how I got there, and the tradeoffs I had to made
The short version
Cost is for 90M requests a month. Latency is the average from Frankfurt and from Columbus, Ohio.
- blockmachine: about $141 a month. Frankfurt 34 ms, Columbus 116 ms.
- SolidRPC: $349 a month. Frankfurt 46 ms, Columbus 171 ms.
- dRPC: $540 a month. Frankfurt 55 ms, Columbus 70 ms.
- GetBlock: about $769 a month. Frankfurt 100 ms (tested on its US endpoint), Columbus 30 ms.
Costs are our estimates from each provider’s public pricing. Latency is from CompareNodes tests on 13 October 2026 (linked below).
What we needed
Our wallet is still in development, but we’re planning for around 3M requests a day once it’s live, so roughly 90M a month. We had three criteria, in this order:
- We can test it before paying. If a provider isn’t on CompareNodes with a free endpoint, we can’t compare it fairly, so it was out.
- Fast from Europe. Our chain indexing will run in Europe, and that’s the part of the system that needs low, steady latency. Our users could be anywhere, but normal wallet use like checking a balance or sending a transaction is far more forgiving.
- Price. At 90M requests a month, the gap between providers is hundreds of dollars.
I found some providers, like Dwellir, couldn’t get successful results in CompareNodes so I had to exclude them, while others like Chainstack didn’t show free public endpoints to try out.
That left four: blockmachine, dRPC, GetBlock and SolidRPC.
How I tested
I used CompareNodes’ RPC Inspector Pro. It fires the same seven methods at each endpoint from two AWS regions, Frankfurt and Columbus, Ohio, with requests spaced at least 1.1 seconds apart. The methods cover both sides of our workload: eth_getLogs and eth_getBlockByNumber for indexing, and eth_getBalance, eth_call and eth_getTransactionReceipt for the wallet itself, plus a block trace.
Get Dan AI’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Two caveats. Free endpoints are rate limited, so some providers only got two or three requests per method before the probe stopped. And GetBlock was tested on its US endpoint, so its Frankfurt number is really a transatlantic round trip. Treat this as a first look, not a lab benchmark. The raw results are linked at the bottom.
Latency results
Frankfurt is the most important for us because our indexer runs there. Blockmachine was the quickest of the four at 34 ms. What mattered more for indexing was how steady it was. On the two eth_getLogs calls its p95 stayed under 46 ms. dRPC was similar on a typical request but spiked to around 160 ms on both, and to 319 ms on the block trace. I want to consistenly pick up new blocks the fastest.
From Columbus it’s a different story. GetBlock was far ahead at 30 ms, dRPC was second at 70 ms, and blockmachine sat at a flat 116 ms, which looks like requests being served from Europe. That’s the user-facing side for us, where an extra 80 ms on a balance check isn’t something anyone will notice.
What it costs at 90M requests a month
- blockmachine, about $140: Business plan at $125, plus a small overage.
- SolidRPC, $349: Solid plan, with 150M responses included.
- dRPC, $540: $6 per 1M requests.
- GetBlock, about $769: Premium plan plus a top-up, our estimate.
Each provider counts usage differently, so these are our estimates for a read-heavy mix with a small share of log queries. The more log-heavy our indexer turns out to be, the more blockmachine’s figure will rise, because it weights eth_getLogs higher than a simple read. The GetBlock figure is the least certain, because it depends on per-method compute unit weights that I had to estimate. SolidRPC also has a pricing change coming on 28 October.
Why I went with blockmachine
It was free to test, it was the fastest and steadiest from where our indexing runs, and it was less than half the price of the next cheapest option.
The trade-off is the US, but 1/10th of a second is fine for loading balances and sending transactions, which is all our users there will be doing.
I’ve been building on blockmachine for two weeks now. No issues so far, and support has been great when I’ve had questions.
