Alchemy for airdrop farming: 2026 review and verdict

Alchemy has been the de facto RPC provider for Ethereum developers since it launched in 2019. Founded by Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau, the company positioned itself as more than just a node service: it sells a full developer platform with enhanced APIs, a mempool explorer, a gas manager, and a notification system on top of raw JSON-RPC access. By 2026, that positioning has mostly held up. Alchemy is the name that comes up first when someone building on Ethereum needs a reliable endpoint, and the free tier is genuinely usable for getting started.

For airdrop farming specifically, the question is narrower than general developer use. You need fast, consistent RPC calls across many wallets, potentially archive-depth data to verify historical eligibility, websocket connections for watching pending transactions, and ideally a pricing model that doesn’t punish you for batch operations. Alchemy ticks most of those boxes, with some notable gaps. The headline verdict: it’s a solid tier-1 pick for Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base farming, but you’ll hit real limitations if you’re running hundreds of wallets or need deep archive reads without paying up.

I’ve been using Alchemy across personal farming setups since 2022, first on the free plan, then on Growth, and I’ve compared it directly against QuickNode and Infura on latency benchmarks from Singapore. What follows is what I actually observed, not what the sales page says.

what Alchemy actually does

Alchemy provides blockchain RPC endpoints that let your scripts, wallets, and bots talk to on-chain data without running your own node. At its core, it’s a managed node service: you get an API key, you point MetaMask or ethers.js or viem at an Alchemy URL, and your calls get routed to their infrastructure.

What separates Alchemy from a raw Geth or Erigon node-as-a-service is the enhanced API layer. alchemy_getAssetTransfers lets you pull full transfer history for a wallet across a time range without iterating block by block. alchemy_getTokenBalances returns all ERC-20 balances for an address in a single call. These aren’t part of the standard Ethereum JSON-RPC spec; they’re Alchemy-specific methods that save you dozens of raw calls. For farming workflows that need to audit wallet history or check eligibility conditions, these matter.

The platform also includes Alchemy Notify (webhooks for address activity, dropped transactions, mined transactions), a Mempool Visualizer in the dashboard, and a Gas Manager for ERC-4337 account abstraction. Most of that is noise for simple farming. What you actually use: RPC endpoints, websockets, and maybe getAssetTransfers for eligibility checks.

Supported chains as of May 2026 include Ethereum mainnet and Sepolia, Polygon and Amoy, Arbitrum One and Nova, Optimism, Base, Zora, Shape, and a handful of others. Solana support exists but is limited compared to what Helius or QuickNode offer on that chain. There’s no support for Sui, Aptos, TON, or most non-EVM ecosystems, which matters if you’re farming cross-chain.

pricing

Alchemy prices by compute units (CUs), not by raw request count. Each RPC method costs a different number of CUs depending on how expensive it is to serve. A simple eth_blockNumber costs 10 CUs. An eth_getLogs call with a wide filter costs 75 CUs. alchemy_getAssetTransfers costs 150 CUs per call. This means pricing is non-linear and you need to profile your actual call mix before estimating costs.

As of May 2026:

• Free tier: 300 million CUs per month, no credit card required. Rate limit is 330 requests per second (RPS) across all methods. One app per account, though you can create multiple accounts.
• Growth plan: $49/month for 400 million CUs, with overage at $1.50 per million CUs. Rate limit increases to 660 RPS. Includes Alchemy Notify webhooks and priority support.
• Scale plan: starts around $199/month with 1.5 billion CUs included. Custom rate limits negotiable.
• Enterprise: custom pricing, dedicated infrastructure, SLA guarantees.

Archive node access, meaning historical state queries before the last 128 blocks, is available on Growth and above. On the free tier, calls like eth_getBalance at an old block number will return an error. This is a meaningful restriction for farming: if you need to verify a wallet’s state at a specific historical snapshot (say, for a token airdrop that was snapshotted at block 18000000), you can’t do that on the free plan.

At 300M CUs/month on the free tier, a wallet checker script running eth_getBalance + eth_getTransactionCount + one alchemy_getTokenBalances per wallet costs roughly 190 CUs per wallet. That gives you about 1.5 million wallet checks per month before you hit the ceiling, which sounds like a lot until you’re running daily eligibility scans across 10,000 wallets and layering in websocket subscriptions.

what works

Enhanced APIs reduce call overhead significantly. alchemy_getAssetTransfers is genuinely useful for eligibility audits. Instead of iterating through every block to find when a wallet first interacted with a protocol, you get paginated transfer history in one call. For farming setups doing retrospective checks, this is worth the CU cost.

Uptime and reliability are best-in-class on Ethereum. Alchemy’s status page shows public incident history. Over the last 12 months the Ethereum mainnet endpoint has had fewer than 3 hours of meaningful downtime. Competing providers have had longer outages during peak load events. For scripts that need to keep running unattended, this matters more than a small latency advantage.

Free tier is genuinely useful, not a bait-and-switch. 300M CUs is enough to run a small farming operation indefinitely without paying. Many providers offer a free tier that’s too small to actually use; Alchemy’s is usable. The rate limit of 330 RPS is also workable for single-threaded scripts or small concurrency setups.

Websocket support is stable. You can subscribe to newHeads, logs, and pendingTransactions via websocket. The pending transaction feed is filtered by default (you only see transactions for addresses you specify) which reduces noise compared to a full mempool subscription. For watching when a farming transaction confirms or setting up event triggers, the websocket API works reliably.

Documentation is thorough and well-maintained. The Alchemy docs cover every method with example requests and responses, CU costs, and error codes. When something breaks in your script, the docs are usually enough to debug it without opening a support ticket.

what doesn’t

CU accounting is opaque until you’re over budget. The dashboard shows CU consumption but doesn’t break it down by method or endpoint in real time on free plans. If your call mix shifts and you’re suddenly burning 3x more CUs per wallet check, you find out at the end of the billing period or when you hit the ceiling. QuickNode’s dashboard is more granular here.

Archive access is paywalled. This is a real gap for farming. Historical state queries are not edge cases; they’re routine for verifying snapshot eligibility, reconstructing on-chain history, or backfilling data. Putting this behind the $49/month Growth plan is a business decision, but it means the free tier has a meaningful capability hole.

Chain coverage has gaps. If you’re farming on Solana, you need a different provider anyway. If you’re farming on Linea, Scroll, zkSync Era, or Mantle, Alchemy’s support is either absent or in beta. For pure Ethereum + mainstream EVM L2 farming (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon), Alchemy covers you. Step outside that and you’re patching in a second or third provider, which adds operational complexity.

Support response time is slow on free and Growth tiers. Email support on free is best-effort, often 48-72 hours. Growth plan gets “priority” support but that’s still async. For production issues at 2am, you’re on your own unless you’re on Scale or Enterprise. For farming scripts this is often fine, but it’s worth knowing.

Rate limits per API key, not per wallet. If you’re using a single Alchemy app for many wallets and one wallet’s activity spikes (say, you’re retrying failed transactions in a loop), that eats into the shared RPS budget for all your other wallets. The architecture rewards splitting traffic across multiple API keys and apps, which adds management overhead.

who should buy

Solo operators farming Ethereum and mainstream L2s at small to mid scale. If you’re managing under 1,000 wallets and primarily touching Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, or Base, the free tier will carry you a long way. You get reliable infrastructure, good docs, and enhanced APIs that reduce your scripting complexity.

Developers building farming automation tools. The enhanced API methods mean less custom indexing code. If you’re writing a tool that checks eligibility conditions across many wallets, alchemy_getAssetTransfers and alchemy_getTokenBalances will save you real development time. See the /blog/ for more context on how RPC choice affects farming tool architecture.

Teams that need archive access for snapshot audits. The Growth plan at $49/month is reasonable if archive data is central to your workflow. Combine it with a residential proxy rotation setup if you’re also managing request origin diversity.

who should skip

High-volume multi-wallet operators running 10,000+ wallets. The CU model will get expensive fast at scale. You’ll spend more time optimizing call patterns around CU costs than actually farming. At that volume, look at dedicated node access or providers with flat-rate pricing.

Solana and non-EVM chain farmers. Alchemy is not the right tool. Full stop. Look at Helius for Solana, or a multi-chain provider.

Operators who need archive data on a tight budget. If you can’t justify $49/month, Ankr has archive access on their free tier for some chains. Worth checking their limitations against your specific call types, as discussed over at multiaccountops.com/blog/ in their RPC cost breakdown posts.

Anyone needing sub-50ms latency from Southeast Asia consistently. Alchemy’s infrastructure is US and EU-heavy. From Singapore, you’re looking at 80-120ms on Ethereum mainnet in my tests. QuickNode has edge nodes closer to APAC that give better latency from this region.

For a full comparison of RPC options across chains and regions, see /blog/best-rpc-providers-for-airdrop-farming/.

alternatives to consider

QuickNode: better APAC latency from Singapore, more granular usage dashboards, and broader chain coverage including Solana and some non-EVM chains. Pricing is also CU-based but the free tier is smaller (10M API credits). Worth it if you’re multi-chain or latency-sensitive.

Infura: the legacy default, now owned by Consensys. Similar chain coverage to Alchemy on EVM, archive access available on paid tiers. The free tier (100,000 requests/day) is more restrictive than Alchemy’s. Rate limit handling has historically been stricter. Some operators in the multi-account space have noted it flags unusual access patterns; see antidetectreview.org/blog/ for discussion of fingerprinting considerations when using shared node infrastructure.

Ankr: public RPC endpoints with no API key required at low volume, plus a paid tier. Archive access is available on some chains even on lower plans. Latency and reliability are a step below Alchemy and QuickNode, but the price-to-access tradeoff is different for budget-constrained setups.

verdict

Alchemy is the most polished RPC provider for EVM farming as of mid-2026, and the free tier is genuinely good enough for most solo operators to get started without spending anything. The compute unit pricing model is the main friction point: costs can spike unexpectedly as your call volume grows, and archive access being paywalled is a real limitation given how often historical state matters in farming workflows. For Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, it’s my default recommendation. For anything else, stack a second provider.

Written by Xavier Fok

disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links. if you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. verdicts are independent of payouts. last reviewed by Xavier Fok on 2026-05-19.