Helius alternatives for Solana streaming
The good news first: you are not locked in. Helius LaserStream is Yellowstone wire-compatible, so a standard Yellowstone client works against it and against almost every alternative on this page. Switching is an endpoint and a token, not a rewrite — which means the decision is purely commercial and operational, and you can reverse it.
That also means the usual reason for leaving is not the protocol. It is that mainnet LaserStream sits on the $499/mo Business plan, and that credits are consumed by throughput — so the busiest days on Solana, when your bot is doing the most useful work, are also your most expensive. If those two facts are not a problem for you, there is a strong case for staying, and we say where below.
Looking for the direct comparison instead? Subglow vs Helius, head to head.
First: when you should stay on Helius
We sell a competing product, so treat this section as the one worth reading carefully. A migration that saves a few hundred dollars a month and costs you a capability you were relying on is a bad trade, and these are the cases where it is.
- You need more than four regions. Helius publishes nine endpoints across the US, EU and Asia — more than anyone else on this list, us included. If your workers run in Tokyo or Singapore, a nearby Helius endpoint will very likely beat a distant one of ours on wire latency.
- You need historical replay. Roughly 216,000 slots, about 24 hours, plus automatic multi-node failover. This is the best gap recovery in the comparison and we offer nothing equivalent — if a disconnect means you must backfill rather than shrug, do not switch to us.
- You use the wider Helius platform. DAS API, webhooks and enhanced transactions on one bill and one key is a real consolidation benefit that a streaming-only vendor cannot match.
- Your credit spend is genuinely below $499 of equivalent flat pricing. Metering is cheaper than flat pricing at low volume. Run your actual message counts before assuming a flat plan saves money.
Why teams look for a Helius alternative
Mainnet streaming starts at the Business plan
LaserStream on mainnet requires Business or Professional. Devnet is available on the cheaper Developer plan, which makes the jump from prototype to production a step change in cost rather than a gradual one — the classic moment teams start shopping.
Credits scale with the market, not with your budget
Streaming draws from the same credit pool as your RPC calls, so a volatile week costs more than a quiet one. That is defensible pricing, but it makes forecasting hard and it punishes exactly the conditions a trading bot exists for.
You still Borsh-decode on the client
LaserStream ships standard Yellowstone protobuf, so instruction data arrives Borsh-encoded and your process pays the decode cost on every message. This is true of nearly every provider here and is not a Helius flaw, but it is the cost people forget when comparing wire latency.
You only need Solana
Helius sells a broad Solana platform — DAS for NFTs and compressed NFTs, webhooks, enhanced transactions. If you use none of it and only stream, you are paying for surface area you do not touch.
The 8 alternatives, with the trade-off named
Every option carries a cost, including ours. Prices are as at 2026-09-06 and sourced in the provider matrix, where each figure is labelled with its provenance.
SubglowThat's us
$99/mo flatBest for: Solana-only streaming bots that want a bill that does not move, and pre-parsed JSON instead of client-side Borsh decoding
Trade-off: Four regions rather than nine, and no historical replay at all. If you need gap recovery after a disconnect, we are the wrong answer.
Triton Dragon's Mouth
Enterprise quoteBest for: Dedicated, latency-optimised Yellowstone from the team that wrote Yellowstone
Trade-off: Enterprise sales cycle and contract pricing. No self-service signup, and you will not be streaming this afternoon.
Triton Fumarole
Enterprise quoteBest for: Durable, resumable streams where a consumer must pick up exactly where it stopped — indexers, accounting, anything that cannot silently lose events
Trade-off: Explicitly trades latency for durability. The wrong product for a sniper, and the same enterprise contract as Dragon's Mouth.
QuickNode
$499/mo (Scale)Best for: Teams on more than one chain who want 80+ networks, one dashboard and one invoice
Trade-off: gRPC is metered in bytes, so the busiest market days are also your most expensive ones.
Chainstack
~$300–400/mo (Growth, indicative)Best for: Multi-chain teams with procurement and compliance requirements, and a generous free tier for development
Trade-off: Yellowstone needs a higher plan tier, and the plan structure changes often enough that you should price it yourself before committing.
Solana Tracker
$247/moBest for: Flat pricing with pre-indexed token metadata, so common lookups are already resolved
Trade-off: Instruction data is still Borsh-encoded, and the plan is more than twice our entry price.
Shyft
Credit-based tiersBest for: Cheap entry when streaming is secondary to a REST surface for NFTs, tokens and wallet history
Trade-off: Streaming is not the focus of the product, and no latency figures are published.
Self-hosted Yellowstone
~$1,500–3,000/mo in hardwareBest for: Teams big enough that provider margin exceeds the cost of an engineer keeping a validator healthy
Trade-off: You now operate a validator: snapshots, upgrades, disk pressure, and a pager. The hardware bill is the small part.
How to migrate off Helius
Because LaserStream speaks the Yellowstone wire protocol, migrating off it is a configuration change in most codebases. The work is not in the client — it is in whatever you were getting for free from the Helius SDK.
- 1
Point your existing client at the new endpoint
Swap the endpoint URL and the x-token metadata. If you use the generated Yellowstone stubs directly, this is the entire code change. Your SubscribeRequest, filters and commitment level carry over unchanged.
- 2
Replace anything the Helius SDK was doing for you
This is the real work. If you relied on the SDK's automatic reconnect, its replay-on-resume, or its failover between nodes, none of that is part of the wire protocol and none of it comes with you. Budget for writing reconnect-with-backoff yourself before you cut over.
- 3
Decide what happens to your gap-recovery story
If you were using the ~24h replay buffer to backfill after an outage, no provider on this list except Triton Fumarole gives you an equivalent. Either accept gaps, or keep a Helius subscription for recovery while streaming primarily elsewhere.
- 4
Run both in parallel before you cut over
Subscribe to the same program on both endpoints from one machine, match on transaction signature, and compare arrival times and completeness for a few hours across a busy period. This costs you one month of overlap and settles the question with your own data rather than anyone's marketing.
One caveat: If you migrate to Subglow specifically, the payload shape changes: we send pre-parsed JSON rather than raw protobuf, so your decode layer gets deleted rather than ported. That is less work overall, but it is not a no-op, and it means going back to a raw-protobuf provider later requires reinstating it.
FAQ
Is there a cheaper alternative to Helius LaserStream?
Yes, several. Subglow is $99/mo flat with no metering, Solana Tracker is $247/mo, and Shyft has credit tiers that start lower. Against LaserStream's $499/mo Business requirement for mainnet, all three are cheaper on paper. The honest caveat is that cheaper providers generally have fewer regions and no replay buffer, so the saving is real but you are buying less operational insurance with it. And if your credit consumption is genuinely low, metered Helius can be cheaper than any flat plan — check your own message volume first.
Do I have to rewrite my bot to leave Helius?
Almost certainly not. LaserStream is Yellowstone wire-compatible, so a standard Yellowstone client works against Helius and against nearly every alternative — changing providers is an endpoint and a token. The part that does not travel is anything the Helius SDK handled for you, principally automatic reconnect, replay-on-resume and node failover. Those are SDK features rather than protocol features, so plan to implement reconnect-with-backoff yourself. If you move to Subglow you also drop your Borsh decode layer, because we send pre-parsed JSON.
What does Helius still do better than the alternatives?
Two things clearly. Regions: nine published endpoints across the US, EU and Asia, more than anyone else in this comparison including us — if your infrastructure is in Asia, a nearby Helius endpoint will likely beat a distant European one regardless of provider quality. And gap recovery: roughly 216,000 slots of replay, about 24 hours, plus automatic multi-node failover. Nothing on this list matches that except Triton Fumarole, which solves it differently and costs enterprise money. Helius also has the broadest Solana API surface, so if you use DAS or webhooks, consolidation has value.
Is Helius LaserStream compatible with Yellowstone clients?
Yes. Helius' own documentation states LaserStream gRPC is compatible with the Yellowstone gRPC library. We are explicit about this because an earlier version of our comparison pages claimed the opposite, which was wrong, and we have corrected it. Practically, it means you can evaluate Helius and its alternatives with the same client code, which makes running your own head-to-head cheap.
Should I move to a self-hosted Yellowstone node instead?
Only if you are large enough that provider margin exceeds the fully-loaded cost of operating a validator. The hardware is the easy part at roughly $1,500–3,000/mo; the hard part is snapshots, Agave upgrades, disk pressure, and someone carrying a pager. Below roughly $1,000/mo of provider spend, self-hosting almost never pays for itself once you price the engineering time honestly.
Can I use Helius and another provider at the same time?
Yes, and it is a common pattern once you have written a client that can point at either. Some teams stream primarily from the cheaper flat-priced provider and keep a smaller Helius plan specifically for its replay buffer, so an outage can be backfilled. Others run both live and take whichever message arrives first. Since both speak Yellowstone, the second subscription costs you configuration rather than code.