The case against per-API-call pricing

The default pricing model for crypto infrastructure is per-call: $0.50 per webhook, $0.10 per RPC request, $5 per wallet generated. We picked tier-based pricing instead. Here's why.

Per-call sounds fair: you pay for what you use. In practice it does three things to your customers:

1. Punishes them for retries. A webhook that fails once and retries five times costs them six webhooks. Their fault for having a flaky endpoint? Maybe. But we'd rather they fix the bug than throttle their retries because of our bill.
2. Discourages monitoring. Every “is this wallet healthy” check costs them. So they don't check.
3. Makes their finance team panic. Variable bills are hard to budget. Tier-based bills are predictable.

Tier-based has a different problem: high-volume tenants on the same plan as low-volume ones cross-subsidize the small accounts. We mitigate that by metering usage and bumping you up when you cross the limit, with a soft 7-day grace period. Nobody gets surprised by a $5,000 bill at 2am.

Will we change pricing as we learn more? Probably. The promise we're making is “your bill won't triple unannounced.”