I’ve been browsing through so many forums and discords and asked many qustions, and could not find a clean solid answer to this. I am wondering what the purpose of using these services like Infura and Alchemy is needed. I’m aware that these blockchain nodes that these services help you set up your own blockchain node, but when do you exactly need your own blockchain node?
I know that Metamask under the hood uses Infura to connect to the blockchain. But is using Infura for something like deploying contracts? I’ve been seeing many of these tutorials use Infura for deploying their contracts through things like Hardhat. But when do you need the paid version for not rate limiting? If you are creating a token and you want your users to mint, does it increase the speed at which they can mint? Is it only for yourself if you wanted to call your own blockchain a lot?
Please, assist and if done, please explain the reasons and use cases for Infura. I’ve had a lot of very terse answers that barely scratch the surface, and I am unable to understand why you would want the premium tiers or what the use cases for those are.
when do you exactly need your own blockchain node?
You’ll need it if you’re going to develop software that interacts with the blockchain (send transactions, call smart contracts, get informations about accounts, etc).
If you run your own node, you need to handle all the aspects of keeping that node up and running and healthy (monitoring, upgrades, etc)
If you use a provider like Infura, you don’t care about any of the tasks above and focus on writing your dapp and connect to the blockchain through our Infura API.
when do you need the paid version for not rate limiting?
If using the free tier and your code would send more than 100k requests/day to the Infura API (eg. to the blockchain) you’ll get rate limited.
It really depends on what you’re trying to build, how complex would that be (in general the dapps would read / send a lot of data from chain), how many environments you have (eg. development, production, etc). You might be good with 100k requests/day or you might need a lot more.
If you are creating a token and you want your users to mint, does it increase the speed at which they can mint? Is it only for yourself if you wanted to call your own blockchain a lot?
The requests performance would be the same on paid plans.