Free RPC for 4 chains, no signup, and the URL actually works when you click it

A few weeks ago I needed a free Ethereum RPC for a side project. Nothing fancy, just somewhere to point ethers.js at.

I googled "free Ethereum RPC" and clicked through five or six results. Every single one wanted me to make an account. Verify my email. Pick a tier. Then they gave me a URL with an API key glued to the end — which I now had to keep secret, because if I committed it to GitHub I'd leak my own quota.

For a weekend project where I just wanted to read a couple of block numbers.

This is rpcfree.com. It's the version of "free RPC" that actually means free.

What you get

Four chains: Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum. One URL per chain, no key on the end:

https://rpcfree.com/ethereum-rpc
https://rpcfree.com/base-rpc
https://rpcfree.com/polygon-rpc
https://rpcfree.com/arbitrum-rpc

Paste into MetaMask. Paste into hardhat. Paste into a Cloudflare Worker. Wherever you need an RPC, that's it.

You get 333,000 calls per day. Ten million per month. Ten requests per second, with a burst of twenty. No account, no email, no captcha, no waiting list. The same URL works for everyone.

If you actually click the URL in a browser, you don't get a JSON error or a "405 Method Not Allowed" page. You get a real documentation page with the current block number, current gas price, code snippets for the five most common libraries, and a button that runs a JSON-RPC call live against the endpoint. Most people who try it for the first time hit that button just to confirm it's not a marketing trick.

How most free RPC services work

If you've shopped around for an RPC, you've probably seen the same pattern repeated.

The premium services with great dashboards and deep features — the ones that occupy the top of every "best RPC" article — give you a free tier in exchange for signup. You make an account, verify your email, get a dashboard, and they hand you a URL with an API key on the end. The friction is small if you're starting a serious production project. It's significant if you just want to read a couple of balances on a weekend.

Then there are the truly keyless public endpoints. Free without signup. But they're just endpoints. No documentation when you click the URL, no live response stats, no one-click wallet integration. You're on your own to figure out if and when they're working. Some are reliable, others less so, and you tend to find out which is which by hitting rate limits at the wrong moment.

rpcfree.com sits in a specific gap. Keyless and free like the public endpoints, but with the kind of interface most people associate with the paid services. The page works. The endpoints are documented. Live stats show you they're responding. One click adds the network to MetaMask. You don't trade an account for a usable experience.

A few things that aren't obvious

Archive data is included. You can query state from block 0 on every chain. Most free providers cap you at the last 128 blocks of state. We don't.

Trace and debug methods work. debug_traceTransaction, trace_call, the lot. Indispensable when you're debugging a contract revert at 2 AM. Most free tiers omit these entirely and you don't find out until you need them.

CU costs are published. eth_blockNumber costs 10 compute units. eth_call costs 26. eth_getLogs is 75. debug_trace is 309. So you can calculate your daily budget upfront instead of guessing. Most providers obscure the cost model on purpose.

Same URL serves documentation and JSON-RPC. Click it in a browser, you get docs. POST to it from your app, you get RPC responses. This sounds trivial but it changes how the link feels when someone shares it. You're not asking people to trust a black-box URL.

When you outgrow the free tier

The honest answer: there is a business model. The free service runs on Etox infrastructure, and if you need more — 30 million CU per month with a free signup, or 300 million with a $49/mo plan — that's at etox.io.

But the free tier isn't a teaser. 333,000 calls per day is real. A typical indie Web3 app, a learning project, a developer demo, a backend service polling balances — none of these come close to the daily cap. We've sized it for actual use, not for forcing upgrades.

Try it

curl -X POST https://rpcfree.com/ethereum-rpc \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_blockNumber","params":[],"id":1}'

Or open https://rpcfree.com in a browser and hit the "Try it now" button. Either way, it works the same.

If you're building something and you've been putting off the "I need to sign up for an RPC service" task, paste one of those four URLs and skip the task entirely.

If it saves you twenty minutes of account creation, that was the point.

rpcfree.com is operated by Etox — blockchain RPC infrastructure. Free tier is open to everyone, no signup required. Pro plans available when you need more.

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