Crypto metrics API cost calculator

What it computes

The job is the one an analyst writes down before opening a pricing page: how many metrics, for how many assets or protocols, refreshed once a day or every hour, with how much history, and whether the numbers stay with you, stay inside a business, or are shown outside it. The calculator turns that into requests a refresh and a month, and into Glassnode's credits, then walks each vendor's plans from the cheapest up and stops at the first one whose published limits the job does not exceed.

That is the point the fundamentals and research hub makes under "Free to read, priced to pull", and the on-chain analytics hub under "The dashboard and the API are two products at two prices", turned into arithmetic. The price that matters is the API plan, and the limits that decide which one are rarely the headline: a data class opened only at a higher rung, a history window, a licence.

Each limit is checked the way the vendor states it. A monthly allowance is set against requests a month. A per-minute, per-hour or per-day rate is checked by asking whether one refresh can finish before the next one starts. History is set against the window the plan serves. "Inside a business" needs a plan whose licence allows business use; "shown outside" also needs redistribution. Where a vendor states a figure the job exceeds, the plan is passed over and the row says why. Where it meters something without stating the figure, the row says not modelled and the plan is not failed on it.

For each vendor the row gives the plan, its month-to-month price and twelve months of it, and its annual price as the yearly charge and its monthly equivalent. Where a vendor prints only one of the two annual figures, the other is marked as arithmetic. Where no published plan fits, the row names the limit that fails on the largest priced plan and what sits above the ladder.

The default job is ten metrics for twenty assets, once a day, a year of history, used inside a business. It fits a free plan on two vendors and a paid plan on three, and fails the sixth outright, for a licence reason rather than a volume one.

Where the numbers come from

Every price and limit was read from the vendor's own pricing page or documentation on 9 October 2026, and the table prints each document beside its figures, with the document's own date where it carries one.

CryptoQuant: prices from the FAQ on its pricing page; data classes, resolution, lookback, rate limits and licences from its Plans & Limits page; credit grants from its API Credits page. DefiLlama: the API plan's price, rate limit, allowance and overage from its pricing documentation; the licence from its terms of use, dated 24 June 2025. Glassnode: its pricing page and the public Professional configurator on the same page, which prints the package, access-level, credit-tier and seat prices and estimates credits the way this calculator does. SanAPI: the For Business (API) tab of Santiment's pricing page, the SanAPI plans page dated 28 October 2025, and section 10.4 of its terms. Coin Metrics: its rate-limit table and its Community Data page. growthepie: its export endpoint, its granularity page and its Data and API Terms dated 2 June 2026.

One figure moved since a card was verified. The SanAPI card, verified on 19 September, describes Essential and Pro as the plans on sale. On 9 October the pricing page's API tab listed Business Pro, Business Max and Custom, and the calculator follows the page.

What it leaves out

Artemis, L2BEAT and Token Terminal. Artemis puts API access on its per-user Plugin seat but publishes that seat's allowance only in spreadsheet calls, and its own API-key page says API access comes with the quoted Managing Director tier. L2BEAT's documented API needs a key and no page says how to get one, what it costs or what it allows. Token Terminal sells its API as a separate plan at custom pricing. None of the three can be priced against your job from a published document, so none is estimated.

Rate limits against quotas. The form checks whether a refresh fits the published rate and the month fits the allowance, and it prices DefiLlama's published overage. It does not model retries, a cap on parallel requests, or a refusal when an allowance runs out halfway through a month. Why API quotas don't compare is the long version, and the rate limit entry has the terms.

What a CryptoQuant call costs in credits. Its credits are deducted by the rows a call returns and by data type, with no rate card, so the monthly grant on each plan is printed and not checked. Premium has no credit limit.

Free tiers that window the history. SanAPI's free plan serves a year ending 30 days ago, Glassnode's API Light fourteen days, CryptoQuant's Basic thirty. growthepie's broad daily file holds ninety days while its per-metric export holds the full history, which is the one the calculator counts. A free tier that fits on volume can still miss the part of the series you came for.

The licence beyond a yes or no. "Business use" is one bucket here; the vendors' clauses are not. Attribution duties, the difference between showing a chart and reselling a feed, and upstream providers' own terms inside a response all sit in the terms each card links. Redistribution is a separate agreement with no published price on DefiLlama, Glassnode and SanAPI; the redistribution entry explains why that is normal rather than evasive.

Enterprise and custom plans. CryptoQuant Enterprise, DefiLlama Enterprise (the only route to its hourly data), Glassnode's unlimited credits, SanAPI Custom and Coin Metrics Pro are quoted. The row names them when the job needs them and does not price them.

Whether the vendor carries your metric. A plan that fits is no use if your chain or protocol is not in the metric. CryptoQuant's on-chain data covers a handful of chains, growthepie covers Ethereum and its layer twos only, and DefiLlama's public endpoints serve fewer data categories than its API plan. Two vendors' versions of one metric also differ by definition, which where an on-chain number comes from and Glassnode vs CryptoQuant take apart.

Seats and the dashboard. Every price is for one user. CryptoQuant allows one user per account, Glassnode charges for each seat after the first, and SanAPI's Business Max includes three. The dashboard plans are not in these ladders: Santiment's own, sold as Santiment, carries a much smaller API allowance than either SanAPI business plan, and Glassnode's Advanced dashboard plan is in the table only for the light API its comparison table credits it with.

Unlock calendars and research. Tokenomist, CryptoRank and Messari sell events and reports rather than metric series, so a count of metrics and assets does not describe what you would buy from them. Their cards carry their API prices.

Trials, discounts and VAT. List prices only, before VAT, coupons, trials or a token-holder discount.