Wallet trade history API pricing: Helius vs Veltra

Cost is usually the last thing you look at when picking a data provider, and the first thing that hurts. A wallet trade history endpoint feels cheap while you are testing against one address. It stops feeling cheap the moment you backfill a few thousand wallets, because the bill scales with trades, not with requests.

This post shows the arithmetic in full so you can check it against your own usage rather than take a marketing number on faith.

Two ways this gets priced

General-purpose Solana infrastructure prices in credits. You buy a pool of credits per month and every API call deducts from it, with the deduction varying by how expensive the method is. Fetching parsed transactions is one of the pricier calls, because the provider is doing the decoding work for you.

A dedicated trade history API can price per trade instead, because the unit it returns is a trade rather than a transaction. That difference sounds cosmetic and is not: it removes the step where you have to translate credits into the thing you actually care about.

The arithmetic

Helius bills the Enhanced Transactions API at 100 credits per call, and credits work out to roughly $5 per million across their paid tiers. Veltra bills $0.01 per 1,000 trades. Reduce both to a per-trade rate and they are directly comparable:

Helius   100 credits/call x $5 per 1M credits  =  $0.0005    per trade
Veltra   $0.01 per 1,000 trades                =  $0.00001   per trade

                                        ratio  =  50x

The credits-per-call figure is the one worth verifying for your own workload — it is the assumption the whole comparison rests on, and it varies by method. Helius publishes its credit costs and pricing tiers, so the numbers above are checkable rather than asserted. Our own rates and included quotas are at https://veltrabot.com/docs/pricing, and the side-by-side breakdown, including where Helius is the better choice, is at https://veltrabot.com/compare/helius.

What that means at real volumes

• 10,000 trades — $5.00 versus $0.10
• 100,000 trades — $50.00 versus $1.00
• 1,000,000 trades — $500.00 versus $10.00

A single active wallet is deeper than most people expect. One address we use for testing has over 172,000 trades in its history, all of which come back from a single call. Backfilling a hundred wallets of that size is seventeen million trades — the point at which the per-trade rate stops being a rounding error and starts being the line item.

Why the ratio does not move

Both sides are pure per-trade rates with no subscription floor mixed in, so the multiple is constant. Plotted on log-log axes the two cost lines run exactly parallel: the gap never narrows at high volume and never closes at low volume. There is no crossover point where the cheaper option stops being cheaper.

That is worth stating because volume-based comparisons usually come with a catch — a tier where the advantage disappears, or a minimum that makes small usage expensive. Here there is neither. Pay-as-you-go has no monthly floor, so 10,000 trades costs ten cents rather than the price of a plan.

One caveat in the other direction: this compares a general-purpose RPC provider against a single-purpose API. Helius does a great deal that Veltra does not — RPC, webhooks, DAS, streaming. If you need those, you need them. The comparison here is specifically the cost of getting a wallet’s trade history, which is the one job Veltra exists to do.

See it end to end

We put the whole thing on video — the request, the response streaming back, cost basis falling out of a real round-trip trade, and the cost comparison with its methodology on screen. Every figure in it is a live API response rather than a mock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOGTsafrLL4

Check it against your own numbers

The free tier is 100,000 trades with no card, which is exactly the volume priced at $1 above — enough to backfill a real wallet and see what the response looks like before deciding anything. Endpoint reference, pagination and the multichain flag are documented at https://veltrabot.com/docs.

curl -N "https://veltrabot.com/v1/wallets/{address}/history" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"