RPC Pricing and Usage Tiers

If you are deciding between Carbium RPC plans, the practical split is simple:

• Free for smoke tests and low-frequency development traffic
• Developer for a real app backend that still fits modest traffic
• Business when you need gRPC or shared production headroom
• Professional when high-throughput production traffic is normal, not occasional

Carbium's published RPC pricing combines monthly credits with a requests-per-second cap. You need both numbers because they answer different questions: total usage over a month, and how much traffic you can push right now.

Part of the Carbium full-stack Solana infrastructure stack.

Published Carbium RPC plans

These are the same published tier limits used across Carbium's current RPC docs and migration guidance.

What you are actually buying

Pricing pages are easier to use when you separate the two limits Carbium publishes:

That means a service can have plenty of monthly credits left and still need a larger tier because it bursts too hard. The reverse is also true: a steady job can stay under the RPS ceiling and still burn through its monthly budget if it runs constantly.

Which plan fits your workload

Free

Use the free tier when you are validating connectivity, wiring a client, or testing a small number of RPC methods against the live endpoint. It is the right place to confirm auth, SDK setup, and basic transaction submission flow without committing budget first.

Developer

Developer is the first plan that makes sense for a real app backend. Pick it when you have one service, one environment, and normal app traffic, but you are still mostly using standard JSON-RPC reads and writes.

Business

Business is the important threshold for teams building faster systems because it is where gRPC becomes available. If your architecture depends on transaction streaming, shared team traffic, or bot-style workloads that can burst, this is usually the minimum serious production tier.

Professional

Professional is for traffic patterns where higher throughput is part of normal operation, not an occasional event. If multiple services share the same budget, if bursts are frequent, or if a failed request has real business cost, this is the safer default than running close to the Business ceiling.

When Business is the real minimum

Do not choose only on monthly price if your architecture already depends on streaming.

Business is the effective minimum when:

• you need wss://grpc.carbium.io/?apiKey=YOUR_RPC_KEY
• you run bots, stream processors, or transaction-centric listeners
• several services or environments share the same RPC key
• your production traffic includes regular spikes instead of flat polling

Carbium's public docs also use the same RPC key for both standard JSON-RPC and gRPC endpoints:

Test the path you plan to pay for

Before choosing a larger tier, test the actual path your app will use.

JSON-RPC smoke test

curl -X POST "https://rpc.carbium.io/?apiKey=$CARBIUM_RPC_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 1,
    "method": "getHealth",
    "params": []
  }'

gRPC / streaming path

If your production design depends on streaming, validate grpc.carbium.io before you lock in the plan decision. gRPC is not just "nice to have later" for bots and transaction-heavy systems. It changes which tier is viable from the start.

Upgrade triggers to watch for

Move up a tier when one of these becomes routine:

• 429 responses appear during normal traffic, not just load tests
• development and production traffic compete for the same headroom
• your team needs gRPC but you are still on Free or Developer
• monthly credits are being consumed steadily enough that the next billing cycle is predictable

If your current issue is burst control rather than total usage, read Solana RPC Rate Limits Explained before assuming the only fix is a bigger plan.

Carbium's pricing table is easiest to use when you match it to workload shape: steady JSON-RPC apps can often stay smaller for longer, while streaming or bot-style systems usually need Business as the practical floor.

Need an RPC plan that matches your production traffic? Review the published tiers, then start with Carbium at carbium.io.