Used For

• +**Your Ethereum nodes desync every 48 hours and kill your trading bot** → Alchemy's nodes stay synced automatically, your bot runs 24/7 without babysitting
• +**You're spending 15 hours/week maintaining blockchain infrastructure instead of building features** → Their APIs handle the connection stuff, you focus on your actual product
• +**Your NFT marketplace crashed during mint day because of traffic spikes** → Auto-scales to handle 2 million requests per minute without breaking
• +One-click wallet integration - users sign in with Google instead of memorizing 12-word phrases
• +Real-time blockchain monitoring that actually tells you when transactions fail before your users complain

Best For

• >Your self-hosted blockchain nodes crash every weekend at 3am
• >Building a crypto app but don't want to spend $10K/month on AWS infrastructure
• >Hit rate limits on Infura during your NFT drop and lost 20% of sales

Not For

• -Traditional web developers with zero crypto plans — you're paying for blockchain stuff you'll never use
• -Hobby projects under 1,000 daily users — the free tier works but you're overengineering a simple project
• -Companies that need everything on their own servers — this is cloud-only, no exceptions

Pairs With

• *MetaMask (the wallet users actually connect to sign transactions)
• *OpenSea (where your NFTs get listed and traded after you mint them)
• *Next.js (for building the frontend that normal humans can actually use)
• *The Graph (to query blockchain data without writing complex database calls)
• *Chainlink (for getting real-world data like stock prices into your smart contracts)
• *Hardhat (for testing your smart contracts locally before deploying to mainnet)
• *Discord (where your community hangs out and complains when gas fees are too high)

The Catch

• !The free tier's 300 million calls disappear in 2 days if you're not careful with test networks
• !Overage fees hit fast during viral moments - one Reddit user got a $2,000 surprise bill after an NFT drop
• !Webhooks can delay 10-30 seconds during network congestion, so you might miss 5% of time-sensitive events

Bottom Line

Cuts blockchain development from months of infrastructure hell to actually building your app.