Infura is foundational infrastructure — it carried a huge share of Ethereum's early dApp traffic, and its Ethereum RPC quality remains excellent. When developers search for an "Infura alternative," it's usually not because the nodes are bad. It's because of how the metering model behaves in production. And Infura's model has a specific failure mode that's different from every other major provider: the daily cap.
How Infura meters you
Infura prices in Compute Units (credits) with daily quotas. Every request costs credits — cheap for an eth_blockNumber, much more for an eth_getLogs or a trace — and your tier grants a fixed number of credits per day. The free tier gives ~6M credits/day, and the paid tiers raise the ceiling but keep the shape: a bucket that refills at midnight UTC.
If you've read our Alchemy Compute Units breakdown, the credit-pricing critique will be familiar: you can't budget in requests, because the mix of methods determines cost, and the expensive methods (logs, traces, batch reads) are exactly the ones real apps lean on. All of that applies to Infura too. But the consequence of hitting the limit is what sets Infura apart.
The failure mode: your app goes dark at 4pm
With Alchemy, exceeding your plan autoscales into overage billing — the failure mode is a surprise bill. Annoying, but your app stays up.
With Infura, the quota is a hard daily ceiling. When you hit it, requests start failing — and they keep failing until the bucket resets at midnight UTC. The failure mode is an outage:
- A tweet sends traffic to your app at 4pm UTC → you burn the day's remaining credits in an hour → your app serves RPC errors for the next 8 hours.
- A bug deploys a polling loop that's 3× chattier than intended → you don't get a warning, you get an afternoon of
429s. - Your indexer does a heavy backfill in the morning → your user-facing reads fail in the evening, because they share the same daily bucket.
The cruel part is the timing: daily caps fail late in the day, during your peak hours, and recover while your users are asleep. Retry logic doesn't help — retries burn nothing but time against a bucket that won't refill for hours. For anything production-facing, this is the metric to interrogate before you sign up: what happens at the moment I exceed my plan? "Bill me" and "throttle my rate" are recoverable answers. "Fail everything until midnight" is not.
The second reason people leave: the chain list
Infura's roots are Ethereum, and the catalog reflects it — excellent Ethereum coverage, solid support for the major L2s (especially Linea, a sibling ConsenSys product), and thin-to-absent coverage beyond the EVM. Around 30 chains, Ethereum-heavy. If your stack touches Solana, Cosmos-SDK chains, Bitcoin-family UTXO networks, or newer L1s, Infura can't be your only provider — so you end up managing two or three dashboards, keys, and bills anyway.
When Infura is still the right call
An honest comparison cuts both ways:
- Pure-Ethereum products. If your entire workload is Ethereum + a major L2, Infura's quality and pedigree are hard to argue with.
- The ConsenSys stack. Deep MetaMask integration and first-class Linea support are genuine advantages if you're building there.
- IPFS. Infura's IPFS gateway is a historic strength most RPC-only providers (including us) don't offer.
- Predictable, low, steady traffic. If your daily usage sits comfortably inside the quota with 5× headroom, the cap may never bite you.
The people who should be looking elsewhere are the ones whose traffic is bursty, growing, or multi-chain — which describes most consumer-facing apps, bots, and indexers we see.
What flat-rate changes
SwiftNodes prices the other way around: a flat monthly rate, limited by requests-per-second, with no daily bucket at all. The differences that matter in practice:
- Bursts degrade gracefully. An RPS limit means a spike gets throttled at the margin — some requests queue or retry — instead of your entire remaining day being forfeited. Afternoon traffic can't kill evening traffic.
-
Method mix doesn't matter. An
eth_getLogscosts the same slot as aneth_blockNumber. You budget in requests — the unit you can actually measure and predict. - One key, 75+ chains. EVM chains plus Solana, Cosmos, Bitcoin-family UTXO networks, and more behind the same endpoint shape — the consolidation play if Infura's Ethereum-first list has you juggling providers (full chain list).
- No KYC, card or crypto. Sign up with an email or a wallet; pay however you want.
For the full feature-by-feature table (free tiers, archive access, payment methods, where Infura wins), see SwiftNodes vs Infura — and if you're weighing the other big providers too, the comparison hub covers Alchemy vs Infura, QuickNode vs Infura, and our dRPC vs Alchemy deep-dive.
The takeaway
Judge an RPC provider by what happens at the worst moment — the traffic spike — not the demo. Infura remains excellent Ethereum infrastructure, but its daily Compute Unit buckets turn success into an availability incident: the cap fails at 4pm and forgives at midnight. If your traffic is steady and Ethereum-only, that may never matter. If it's bursty, growing, or multi-chain, pick a model where the worst case is a throttle, not an outage.
Start on the free tier — 2 req/s, no daily cap, no card required — and see the full Infura comparison for the numbers side by side.
Originally published on the SwiftNodes blog. SwiftNodes provides flat-rate multi-chain RPC endpoints — HTTP + WebSocket, 75+ chains, no per-request metering. Grab a free key.
