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Helius vs QuickNode

Helius is three times cheaper per standard read. QuickNode is three times cheaper per history read. Which one costs you less comes down to a single number: what share of your calls are getBlock, getTransaction or getSignaturesForAddress.

That crossover is at 22%.

Cost per million calls

Method category Helius QuickNode
Standard reads (getAccountInfo, getBalance) $5.00 $15.00
sendTransaction $5.00 $15.00
History (getBlock, getTransaction, getSignaturesForAddress) $50.00 $15.00
getProgramAccounts $50.00 $15.00
DAS / Metaplex (getAsset*) $50.00 $30.00
Large scans (getLargestAccounts, getSupply) $5.00 $60.00

Helius bills credits at $5.00/M: 1 credit for standard calls, 10 for archival, DAS and getProgramAccounts. QuickNode bills credits at $0.50/M: a flat 30 credits for every standard Solana method including history, 60 for DAS, 120 for large scans.

Verified 2026-09-05 against helius.dev/pricing and quicknode.com/api-credits/solana.

These are pay-as-you-go and overage rates — the per-call price once an included quota is spent. A subscription's effective rate differs; see "Paid entry" below.

Where the crossover sits

Blending standard reads and history calls, with h as the history share:

Blended $/M
Helius $5.00 + $45.00 × h
QuickNode $15.00 flat

They meet at h = 22.2%. Below that Helius is cheaper; above it QuickNode is.

History share Helius QuickNode Cheaper
0% $5.00 $15.00 Helius, 3.0×
10% $9.50 $15.00 Helius
22% $14.90 $15.00 —
30% $18.50 $15.00 QuickNode
50% $27.50 $15.00 QuickNode, 1.8×
100% $50.00 $15.00 QuickNode, 3.3×

A wallet backend or a trading bot lives near the top of that table. An indexer or an analytics backfill lives near the bottom. Most applications are further left than their authors expect — getAccountInfo volume tends to dwarf everything.

The clean exception is getProgramAccounts. Helius charges 10 credits for it, so a getProgramAccounts-heavy workload pays $50/M there regardless of how the rest of the mix looks.

Free tier

Helius QuickNode
Allowance 1M credits/month 10M credits, once
Rate limit 10 req/s 15 req/s
Writes 1 sendTransaction/s no separate cap published
Renews Monthly No — it is a trial
Overage Yes, on paid tiers Not sold on the trial

Helius's renews and QuickNode's does not, which makes Helius the better long-term free leg despite being a tenth the size. QuickNode's 10M credits is about 333k standard calls; when they are gone the endpoint stops rather than billing on.

The 1 write/second on Helius free is the limit people actually hit.

Both start at $49/month: Helius Developer (10M credits, 50 req/s, 5 writes/s) and QuickNode Build (80M credits, 50 req/s). At face value QuickNode's 80M looks like 8× more, but its methods cost 30 credits against Helius's 1 — so $49 buys roughly 10M standard calls on Helius and roughly 2.7M on QuickNode. Compare the dollars per call, not the credit counts.

Which to choose

Helius if you are read-heavy, write often, or run getLargestAccounts-style scans. The $5/M write rate is the best of any provider on this site, and the credit model rewards workloads that stay on account state.

QuickNode if you index. No archival premium is a real structural advantage for anything walking the ledger, and it is the only provider here where getBlock costs the same as getAccountInfo.

Both, if your workload has a heavy tail in one direction. The split is mechanical:

[[providers]]
name    = "quicknode"
url     = "https://your-endpoint.solana-mainnet.quiknode.pro/${QUICKNODE_API_KEY}/"
methods = ["getBlock", "getTransaction", "getSignaturesForAddress", "getBlocks"]

[[providers]]
name = "helius"
url  = "https://mainnet.helius-rpc.com/?api-key=${HELIUS_API_KEY}"

methods restricts QuickNode to the history calls it is cheapest at; Helius is left unrestricted so it takes everything else and covers QuickNode if it fails. See configuration and routing.

Setup: Helius · QuickNode · all seven providers compared