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Pricing & Payments

One of the main reasons to run a Gateway is to control how consumers pay. The Gateway settles with Indexers in the background through Graph Tally, which frees an Operator to present whatever pricing model fits their customers: pay-as-you-go, a subscription, a flat enterprise fee, or a blend of different plans. This page covers how Gateway costs are structured and the models an Operator can offer on top.

Separating Query Costs From Indexing

A key concept for pricing is that querying and indexing are separate economic activities on The Graph Network, and a Gateway is concerned almost entirely with the first.

  • Query Costs: what Gateway Operators pay Indexers to serve live queries. These are the per-query fees a Gateway settles through Graph Tally, sized by each Indexer’s Agora cost model and an Operator’s budget. Query cost scales with usage: more queries, more fees. This is the cost a Gateway Operator passes through (with margin) to data consumers.
  • Indexing Costs: what it takes to get a Subgraph indexed and kept fresh in the first place. On The Graph Network, indexing is incentivized through curation signal and indexing rewards (new GRT issuance) on rewards-enabled chains, and through Indexing Payments (e.g., recurring on-chain payments via CHIPs and DIPs with no curation signal) where rewards do not reach or baseline coverage falls short, rather than paid per query. If a Subgraph an Operator’s customers need is under-indexed, the lever is incentivizing Indexers to sync it, not paying more per query.

At the protocol level, The Graph keeps these pricing mechanisms separate. When these Gateway costs are consumer-facing, there is flexibility in how a Gateway Operator can handle pricing. Query costs and indexing costs can be managed as add-ons, bundles, or have entirely different pricing models. Indexing is a supply-side concern Gateways manage separately, and it is why a Subgraph that no Indexer has synced cannot simply be bought into existence at query time.

Pay-As-You-Go Models

The most natural model for a Gateway is usage-based: consumers pay in proportion to the queries they make. This maps directly onto how the Gateway itself incurs cost, so margins are predictable.

There are two common implementations:

  • Metered API Keys: a consumer holds an API key, a Gateway meters queries per key (Titorelli’s gateway_client_fees_hourly aggregation is built for exactly this), and an Operator bills periodically. For example, Edge & Node’s Subgraph Studio pricing is a reference point for this model: a free tier of 100,000 queries per month, then usage-based pricing beyond it (for example, $2 per additional 100,000 queries). An Operator can mirror that shape or set their own rates and free allowance.
  • x402 Pay-Per-Query: for autonomous agents and accountless consumers, x402 settles each query in USDC on Base at request time. There is no bill and no account; the consumer pays as they go, query by query. This is the pure pay-as-you-go model and is well suited to AI data services and agent traffic.

Pay-as-you-go pricing is transparent and fair, and it aligns an Operator’s revenue with their cost. Its tradeoff is variability: a consumer with spiky usage sees a spiky bill.

Subscription and Flat-Fee Models

For customers who prefer predictable spend, or for enterprise relationships, a Gateway can offer subscription or flat-fee pricing instead of (or alongside) metering.

  • Subscription Tiers: bundle an included query volume into a monthly price, with overage billed usage-based above the cap. The Substreams pricing tiers are a reference for this shape: a free tier, mid tiers at fixed monthly prices with generous included volume, and per-unit overage rates. Tiers let a consumer pick a predictable plan and only pay usage-based rates once they exceed it.
  • Enterprise Tier: a single negotiated price for a defined scope of access, often paired with an SLA, dedicated support, and possibly a dedicated or staging indexing environment. This suits large customers who value predictability and guarantees over paying exactly per query. See Gateway Indexing Approaches for the SLA-backed environments that typically accompany these deals.

Because a Gateway absorbs the underlying per-query settlement, an Operator is free to decouple what the consumer pays from what any single query costs the Operator. Subscriptions trade some usage-alignment for predictability, which is often exactly what enterprise customers want.

Payment Methods

A Gateway can accept familiar payment rails from consumers, independent of the GRT settlement happening underneath:

  • Card: for metered and subscription billing, the same way Subgraph Studio and The Graph Market accept cards.
  • Crypto: GRT and, for x402, USDC on Base.

Underneath any of these, a Gateway pays Indexers in GRT through Graph Tally escrow. The consumer’s payment method and an Operator’s Indexer settlement are deliberately decoupled, which is what makes flexible pricing possible.