Engineering

Why We Launched a Free Public RPC (And How It Stays Free)

rpcfree

Why We Launched a Free Public RPC (And How It Stays Free)

333,000 RPC calls a day. Four blockchains. Zero API keys. No signup. Here’s the philosophy and the infrastructure behind rpcfree.com.

When someone builds their first Web3 app, the first wall they hit isn’t smart contracts. It isn’t Solidity. It isn’t even gas fees. It’s the moment they realize they need an RPC endpoint to talk to a blockchain — and that “free” usually means rate-limited, unreliable, or both.

We built rpcfree.com to remove that wall.

What rpcfree.com actually is

A free, public JSON-RPC service for four major networks:

  • Ethereum mainnet — full archive, trace methods enabled
  • Polygon PoS — Bor archive, full historical state
  • Base — Coinbase’s Ethereum L2
  • Arbitrum One — the largest Ethereum L2 by TVL

No signup. No API key. No tracking dashboard pestering you for an upgrade. You paste the endpoint into your wallet, your script, your dApp — and it just works.

Daily volume sits around 333,000 calls. Bandwidth headroom for roughly 10x that. Archive data is included by default, which matters more than most realize — debugging transactions, replaying state, building indexers all require it, and it’s the first thing paywalled elsewhere.

Why we built it

The honest answer: we wanted something that didn’t exist.

Public endpoints listed on chainlist.org and similar registries exist, but they’re typically community-maintained, frequently overloaded, and rarely include archive data. Building anything serious on top of them is fragile.

The alternative — running your own node — is a real engineering project. A Polygon archive node alone needs 14 TB of fast storage, 128 GB of RAM, and someone willing to babysit hard forks at 2 AM. That’s a barrier most builders shouldn’t have to clear just to deploy a hobby project.

So we built the thing we kept wishing existed: a free tier that’s not a trial, not a funnel, not a signup wall. Just infrastructure.

How the infrastructure works

Everything runs on dedicated hardware in European data centers — not serverless, not auto-scaled containers. Long-lived blockchain nodes need long-lived machines.

The current footprint:

  • Storage: 14 TB NVMe RAID per Polygon archive node, 8 TB+ for Ethereum, smaller footprints for Base and Arbitrum
  • Memory: 128 GB per archive node; the larger archive databases pin most of it
  • Software: Erigon for archive workloads (Ethereum, Polygon), Geth and other clients where appropriate
  • Frontend: a thin Lua gateway in front of Nginx, handling routing, rate limiting, and response sanitation

The gateway is the part most people don’t see. It does three things:

  1. Routes incoming JSON-RPC requests to the right backend
  2. Applies per-client rate limits that distinguish “polite user with a buggy loop” from “actually abusive traffic”
  3. Returns standard 429 responses with Retry-After headers, so well-behaved clients back off cleanly

Returning a clean 429 instead of dropping connections is a small thing, but it’s the difference between a dApp that degrades gracefully and one that throws cryptic errors to users.

How it stays free

This is the question we get most often. Free public infrastructure has a long history of dying once the bills come due, so it’s worth being explicit.

rpcfree.com is operated by the same team that runs Etox.io, a paid Web3 platform. Etox customers fund the dedicated tier and the underlying infrastructure capacity. The free public endpoints share that infrastructure, with rate limits that protect the paid tier from abuse without crippling honest free use.

This is not freemium. We don’t ask free users to “upgrade.” rpcfree.com has no signup flow at all — there’s nothing to convert into. It exists because the marginal cost of letting honest traffic through is low, and because public infrastructure is something the ecosystem needs more of, not less.

Concrete numbers, since transparency matters:

  • Server costs: roughly €500/month for the current footprint across all four chains
  • Bandwidth: included in dedicated hosting plans at this volume
  • Headcount: zero dedicated, handled by the Etox infrastructure team alongside the paid product
  • Ad revenue: none — there are no ads, no analytics trackers, no third-party scripts

The economics work because the infrastructure was going to exist regardless. We had archive nodes for the paid platform. Opening a free endpoint on top of them costs us bandwidth and engineering time, not new hardware.

What we don’t do

A few things worth being explicit about, since they shape what “free” actually means:

  • No request logging beyond what’s needed for rate limiting and abuse prevention. We don’t keep transcripts of your queries.
  • No address tracking. We don’t correlate which wallets call which methods.
  • No third-party analytics. The site has no Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Segment.
  • No selling traffic data. There’s nothing to sell, because we don’t collect it.

The wallets and dApps you connect through rpcfree.com see exactly what any RPC provider sees: the JSON-RPC calls themselves. We treat those as ephemeral routing data, not as a dataset.

What’s next

The four current chains cover the majority of real Web3 traffic. The roadmap from here:

  • More chains — likely Optimism and a Solana endpoint in the coming weeks, based on user requests
  • WebSocket subscriptions — for real-time eth_subscribe workloads
  • Public status page — so users can verify latency and uptime without taking our word for it
  • Documentation — full method support matrices per chain, code examples in common languages

We’ll publish updates here as they ship. The endpoint URL stays stable — additions are additive, not breaking.

Try it

Add rpcfree.com to your wallet or use it directly in code:

// viem
import { createPublicClient, http } from 'viem'
import { mainnet } from 'viem/chains'

const client = createPublicClient({
  chain: mainnet,
  transport: http('https://rpcfree.com/ethereum-rpc'),
})

const block = await client.getBlockNumber()

# curl
curl -X POST https://rpcfree.com/ethereum-rpc 
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" 
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_blockNumber","params":[],"id":1}'

No signup. No key. If you build something with it, we’d love to hear about it — feedback shapes what we work on next.

rpcfree.com is operated by Etox.io. Have feedback or chain requests? Reach us on X.