Helius is the most-used Solana RPC and data provider as of 2026. If you ship a Solana dapp without thinking too hard about which provider to pick, you'll probably end up here, and that's usually the right call.
What you actually get
- Solana RPC. All standard JSON-RPC methods, low latency, with optional enhanced transactions that decode parsed instructions for you instead of returning raw bytes.
- DAS API. The Helius implementation of the Digital Asset Standard — query NFTs (regular and compressed), token metadata, balances. This is what Phantom and Backpack call when they show your wallet contents.
- Webhooks. Subscribe to specific accounts or transaction patterns; Helius pings your URL when something happens. Removes the need to poll
getSignaturesForAddressin a loop. - Priority fee API. Recommended priority fee for an instruction set, computed across recent blocks. Critical for getting transactions landed during congestion.
Pricing
Free tier: 1M credits/month, ~10 requests/sec, mainnet + devnet. Enough for early dev and small production traffic.
Paid plans start at $99/month and scale by credits. The pricing model is usage-based — different methods cost different credit amounts (a getAccountInfo is 1 credit, a complex DAS query is 50+).
When Helius is right
- Most production dapps — wallets, NFT viewers, DeFi UIs, mints
- Anything touching compressed NFTs (DAS is mandatory)
- You want webhooks instead of writing your own indexer
When Helius is wrong
- Latency-critical MEV / market making. Helius is fast but not bare-metal-dedicated. Triton One has 10–30ms lower p99 latency in our experience.
- Multi-chain projects. Helius is Solana-only. If you also need Ethereum, you're managing two vendors. QuickNode or Alchemy might make more sense.
- Hard cost constraints. At very high volume the credit model can get expensive — at that point dedicated nodes from Triton or Syndica may pencil out.
Setup notes
Get an API key from the dashboard, then:
const RPC = "https://mainnet.helius-rpc.com/?api-key=YOUR_KEY";
const connection = new Connection(RPC, "confirmed");For DAS, hit https://mainnet.helius-rpc.com/?api-key=YOUR_KEY with method getAssetsByOwner. The response shape matches the Metaplex DAS spec.
Resources
- Docs
- Blog — surprisingly readable engineering posts
- Status page