Allium

What it is

A SQL platform over blockchain data Allium indexes, aimed at institutions rather than at analysts browsing on a Sunday. The query surface — the Allium App, branded Explorer — runs on Snowflake, covers 85+ chains, and is bought the same way every product in this shape is bought: you write the query, and what you pay for is the index, the schema and the compute.

The thing to hold on to is that "Allium" is five products, not one, and the comparison table in its own docs says so. Explorer is the SQL editor. Datashares put the same tables into your Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, S3 or GCS. Realtime APIs, Datastreams and Beam are separate low-latency products with different chain counts, different freshness and separate bills. This card is about the SQL side; a quote for one is not a quote for the others.

What Allium has that the self-serve end of the category does not is a maintained attribution layer. Its identity tables cover 400M+ curated addresses, and it publishes column-level definitions for its wallet classification — which is the difference between asking what happened and asking who did it.

Pricing

There is no self-serve price. The pricing page is a demo request form. It names no tiers, no seats and no figures, and neither do the docs. If you need to know what Allium costs before you plan around it, you need a sales call first.

What the docs do publish is the billing basis, product by product, and the bases do not translate into each other. Explorer is billed on query compute time, metered in "Explorer Units" against a plan allocation, with an admin choice of unlimited overage, capped overage or a hard stop at the allowance. Datashares are billed by the number of chains and schemas. Realtime APIs are billed on call volume, Datastreams on destinations and egress, Beam on pipeline plus consumption. In this category the API is normally the dearer product, and here it is not even the same product: the dashboard subscription and the realtime feed are priced on different meters and quoted separately.

Compute is under your control and so is its cost. Explorer compute profiles come in 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x sizes which consume credits at the same multiple, three profiles per organisation, each with its own queue. Allium is explicit that the speed-ups are approximate and that a 2x profile will not reliably halve a 30-second query — so the sizes are a way to buy queue isolation and headroom, not a straight speed-for-money trade.

The one place Allium does print numbers is machine payments, and they are worth knowing even if you never use the rail. Endpoints at agents.allium.so answer with an HTTP 402 challenge and take USDC per call — no API key, no registration, no subscription. Submitting raw SQL to Explorer costs $0.01 a run, checking run status $0.01, realtime price lookups $0.02, token search and wallet balance or PnL calls $0.03, and fetching a completed query's results is priced dynamically, which is the one open-ended item in the list. Two caveats before treating that as a price list: only the raw-SQL endpoint accepts machine-payment authentication, the rest of the Explorer endpoints still want an API key; and the rate limit on this route is 3 requests a second.

Data & coverage

Explorer runs at roughly one hour behind the chain by Allium's own table, and Datashares one to three hours. That is the number to plan against — the sub-second latencies quoted on the marketing pages describe the realtime products, which are a different purchase.

Depth on major chains goes to contract-call level and past it. Ethereum carries raw blocks, transactions, logs, traces, contracts, block rewards, per-standard token tables and state diffs; decoded contracts, logs and traces; an assets layer with balances, latest balances, daily balances, credit/debit ledgers, token transfers, stablecoin lists and transfers, and fungible PnL down to five-minute buckets; and a DEX layer with aggregator trades, events, fees and JIT liquidity events. Solana gets raw instructions and inner instructions, non-voting variants of each, SPL token balances and supply, decoded instructions and events, a program IDL registry and protocol-specific tables such as Drift V2 instructions.

Beyond EVM and Solana, the catalogue is organised by ecosystem: Hyperliquid (raw, DEX, metrics, prices, stablecoins and wallet features) and Lighter on the perps side, the Bitcoin family (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Stacks), the Cosmos family (Cosmos, dYdX, Injective, Osmosis, Celestia, Babylon, Kava, Dymension, Mantra, Provenance) and the Move family (Aptos, Sui, IOTA). Depth thins as you go down that list, and the count of chains says nothing about it.

Cutting the other way are the data verticals, which is where the judgement sits: stablecoins, payments, RWAs, prediction markets, perpetuals, bridges, lending, NFTs, CEX flows, prices, tokens, Wallet 360, wallet classification and an agents vertical covering x402, MPP and ERC-8004. Identity splits into basic and premium sets, with the premium one covering 400M+ curated addresses — exchange hot, cold and deposit wallets across Binance, Coinbase, OKX, KuCoin, Kraken and 100+ other venues, plus payment processors, on/off-ramps and stablecoin issuers — alongside OFAC and other sanctions lists and country-level attribution across 30 chains. The geographic tables ship with a documented measurability tiering, which is more than most label sets admit to.

Integrations

An MCP server at mcp-oauth.allium.so for sign-in or mcp.allium.so for key auth, with tools for SQL, saved queries, schema and documentation search, dashboards, realtime prices and balances, and a Hyperliquid proxy. An Explorer API that runs raw SQL or a saved query asynchronously, polls status and returns results, and that manages compute profiles programmatically (create, resize and delete need an organisation admin key). Saved queries can be turned into API endpoints from the app. Warehouse delivery through Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery shares or files on S3 and GCS. An AI assistant that writes SQL from a plain-English question. On the administrative side, SSO/SAML, MFA, IP allowlisting, session timeouts and role-based user management — the enterprise half of the product, and a fair signal of who it is sold to.

Limitations

• You cannot price this yourself. No tiers, no seats, no figures on the pricing page or in the docs. A comparison against anything self-serve is a comparison against an unknown.
• No free tier and no documented trial. Without a contract there are two ways in: the machine-payments rail, which is rate-limited to 3 requests a second and bills the results endpoint at a price the docs call "dynamic"; and an application-gated academic programme, which Allium's own product pages advertise as free access for research institutions and which it prices nowhere.
• Explorer is not a live view. One hour behind for Explorer and up to three for Datashares. If you need the current block you are buying a second product.
• The five products have five chain counts, and Allium's own pages disagree on one of them: the comparison table credits the realtime APIs with 20+ chains, and the realtime API overview prints 13+ in its own summary line and 20+ two paragraphs below it. The headline disagrees too: the docs say 85+ chains for Explorer, the marketing pages say 150+ for the same product. Confirm the chain you care about against the endpoint you intend to call, not against a headline.
• Labels are a judgement you cannot audit. 400M+ addresses is a large claim and the docs give no revision date for the label set. Basic and premium identities are documented as separate things, which suggests attribution is entitled separately — the docs never say outright what the base subscription includes.
• No alerting in the SQL product. Nothing in the Explorer docs schedules a query and notifies you; the event-driven half of that job lives in Datastreams and Beam, which are separate purchases.
• Three compute profiles per organisation, and the size multipliers are explicitly not speed guarantees.

Alternatives

The obvious comparison is Dune, which occupies exactly the same shape — SQL over somebody else's index — from the other end of the market: published prices, a free plan, API access on every tier, and no first-party labels at all. If the question is what happened on this contract, the self-serve option answers it this afternoon for nothing. If the question is whose wallet is this, or if procurement needs SSO and a contract, that is what Allium sells and what the sales call is about.