What the Free Plan Covers: Method Weights and Usage
Understand what the Free Plan covers based on real method weights, with task-based calculations and upgrade paths.
What the Free Plan is suited for
BlockVectra's Free Plan provides an out-of-the-box blockchain interface for developers. Without requiring a credit card, you can use it for local development, personal projects, lightweight automation bots, contract event tracking, and moderate-frequency chain data queries. With reasonable call scheduling and efficient endpoints, it usually covers most development testing and prototyping needs.
Billing is metered in Compute Units (CU): each method consumes CU according to its weight, with usage pooled across all chains, JSON-RPC, and the Data API. For detailed billing rules, see the Pricing page.
Method weights and period capacity
The table below calculates the estimated call capacity for common methods within a single usage window based on the active method weights and platform API data. All numbers are computed at build time from the platform API:
The Free Plan requires registering an account and using an API key; all keys under an account share an average of 25 calls per second (short bursts allowed). At the end of each 30-day cycle, balances below 30,000,000 CU are refilled to 30,000,000 CU (balances at or above are neither refilled nor deducted); refills do not stack on top of the remaining balance.
| Method | CU Weight | Approx Calls / Cycle | Approx / Day | List Price / 1M Calls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
eth_blockNumber | 1 | 30,000,000 | 1,000,000 | $0.1 |
eth_getBlockByNumber | 5 | 6,000,000 | 200,000 | $0.5 |
eth_getBalance | 10 | 3,000,000 | 100,000 | $1 |
eth_call | 15 | 2,000,000 | 66,666 | $1.5 |
eth_getLogs | 30 | 1,000,000 | 33,333 | $3 |
debug_traceTransaction | 100 | 300,000 | 10,000 | $10 |
data.block | 5 | 6,000,000 | 200,000 | $0.5 |
data.address_balances | 25 | 1,200,000 | 40,000 | $2.5 |
data.dex_prices | 15 | 2,000,000 | 66,666 | $1.5 |
data.transaction_trace | 200 | 150,000 | 5,000 | $20 |
Task examples and upgrade paths
To help you assess usage, here are calculations for representative development tasks:
- Polling eth_blockNumber once per second: about 2,592,000 calls per cycle, consuming only 8.6% of the free quota.
- Tracking contract events with eth_getLogs: polling every 60s consumes 4.3%, every 10s consumes 25.9%, and every 2s consumes 129.6% (exceeds free quota).
- Querying balances for 1,000 addresses every 10 minutes (data.address_balances): total consumption per cycle is 108,000,000 CU, which is 3.6x the free allowance; the average call rate is only 1.67 calls/sec (all keys under an account share an average of 25 calls per second (short bursts allowed)), showing that usage exceeds the CU quota rather than the rate limit; at list price this task's total usage is about $10.8/month — making it a natural upgrade path.
Getting started and upgrading
The free quota is ideal for development, testing, and lightweight workloads. When your traffic expands and requires higher concurrency or more compute units, make a paid top-up in the Console to upgrade to a paid account. After topping up, you are no longer constrained by the Free Plan's per-second call limit; each key remains subject to CU rate and burst limits, as described in the JSON-RPC documentation. Any unused Free Credits stay in your Credits and can still be used. For current rates and billing units, please see the Pricing page.
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