Nodely puts its Unlimited Algorand API tier on Akita's on-chain subscription marketplace

2026-08-23

market · subscriptions · payments · infrastructure · api · discovery · web · algorand · updated

A node company sells its premium tier as a subscription

On Akita Subscriptions, a marketplace for [on-chain](/glossary/on-chain "Describes transactions that are recorded and permanently stored on a blockchain ledger, making them publicly visible and tamper-resistant.") recurring payments, the most prominent listing belongs to a node company rather than a creator or community. Nodely, the Warsaw team formerly known as AlgoNode that carries a large share of the Algorand ecosystem's node and [indexer](/glossary/indexer "A service that organizes and indexes blockchain data so that applications can quickly search and retrieve information from the blockchain.") traffic — 115M+ API requests a day by its own count — now offers its Unlimited tier there for 249 USDC a month, billed by a smart contract instead of a card charge or an invoice. The listing, published under a Nodely Sales Team account behind the on-chain name akitasubs.avail.algo, makes Nodely the first provider on the platform other than Akita itself, and the terms are pinned at subscription time: the amount, payment asset, and cadence cannot change while the subscription is active.

Why recurring billing needed a workaround

A blockchain confirms a payment the moment it is signed, but nothing in the protocol can reach back into a wallet a month later to debit the next cycle the way a card network does. Akita's answer, designed by lead developer krby and funded through Algorand's [xGov](/glossary/xgov "Algorand's community grant-funding program: ALGO holders lock tokens into term pools to earn voting power, and the resulting votes decide which ecosys") grant program, is an escrow. A subscriber mints a subscription that acts as an escrow contract; the first payment goes through immediately, and as long as the escrow holds funds for the next cycle, anyone — not just the merchant — can trigger the release to the provider during the valid payment window. The trigger earns a small incentive, which removes the need for a centralized billing server, and the subscriber can close the subscription at any time and withdraw what remains.

The design is spelled out in xGov-116, an approved proposal from January 2024 that requested 50,000 ALGO: 'The contract charges a 4% fee with 0.5% going to the account that triggers the payment during a valid payment window.' Krby explained the escrow choice in the same document: 'We decided to use an escrow system as opposed to delegated logic signatures because it was clear our ecosystem wallets are hesitant to support them due to the risks they create.' The platform's interface still quotes that rate today, with providers keeping 96% of each standard payment.

The tradeoff a subscriber carries is custodial in a specific sense. The contracts are open source in the akita-protocol/akita-sc monorepo, but no audit of the subscription contract is documented in the sources reviewed for this article, and the escrow model means prepaying funds that sit in a contract-controlled account until each cycle is released. A contract bug, or a provider that stops delivering, leaves recovery to the contract's own cancel-and-withdraw path rather than to a chargeback.

What the listing includes

The Nodely Unlimited offering quotes five headline terms:

Concept	Real-World Implication
Unlimited RPC requests to all Algorand networks	No per-request metering on commercial endpoints, spanning Algorand [mainnet](/glossary/mainnet "The main public blockchain network where transactions are recorded and have real value, as opposed to a test network used for experimentation."), [testnet](/glossary/testnet "A separate, experimental version of a blockchain used for testing new features or applications without real-world financial risk. Assets and transacti") and betanet
6,000 req/s per key or site	A busy production app can burst hard without rate ceilings — six times the 1,000 req/s site cap on the free tier
500 req/s per IP	Shared infrastructure is protected from a single bot or office address
99.995% SLA	Downtime becomes a contractual matter; Nodely's own contract page for the same tier quotes a 99.99% service-level objective, a small discrepancy between the two pages
Node, Indexer/Explorer archival, unlimited [IPFS](/glossary/ipfs "A decentralized file storage system where data is stored across multiple computers, making it resistant to censorship or loss. NFTs often use IPFS to ") gateway	Full historical chain state, with asset metadata served outside any response quota

A comparison helps frame the price. Nodely's Unlimited docs list the same tier at 256 USD a month by card, SWIFT, or USDCa, making the on-chain listing marginally cheaper and settled entirely in Circle's USDC on Algorand ([ASA](/glossary/algorand-standard-asset "A built-in mechanism that allows anyone to create and issue new tokens (like stablecoins, utility tokens, or NFTs) directly on Algorand's base layer, ") 31566704) — a [stablecoin](/glossary/stablecoin "A cryptocurrency whose value is designed to stay stable, usually by being pegged 1:1 to a traditional currency like the US dollar (e.g. USDC) or, in H") issued as an Algorand Standard Asset, the network's built-in mechanism for creating tokens directly on-chain. The same docs note a 2 TB monthly response quota (excluding IPFS) that the marketplace page itself does not mention.

What the on-chain record shows

The identity behind the listing checks out. The NFD name akitasubs.avail.algo resolves to an account tied to Nodely's AVAIL validator service, whose deposit account is the provider address printed on the listing, and the name's registry entry points back to the service page itself. The platform's mainnet contract registry lists the live subscription application — version 0.0.4, created by the same address that deployed Akita's DAO and wallet contracts — and that contract currently stores 16 box records, the on-chain state that tracks services, subscriptions, and per-address counters.

Adoption, measured honestly, is early. The provider account holds zero USDC and about 10 ALGO; subscriber prepayments would sit in the contract's own escrow until each cycle's trigger, so the provider account only ever holds paid-out revenue. Its history since creation on January 22, 2026 shows no recurring USDC inflow — the only USDC that passed through it, 239.04 sent out on February 26 to a wallet that resolves to urtho.algo, looks like setup activity rather than subscription payouts — and its most recent on-chain activity dates to August 17, 2026.

An early marketplace on an active protocol

The platform's two providers split four offerings. Akita itself sells three membership tiers — Plus at 20, Pro at 60, and Ultra at 100 USDC a month — gating features of its Hyperspace social app such as badges, social-impact boosts, and access to staking pools, auctions, and raffles; Nodely's Unlimited listing is the only offering from outside. Underneath, the protocol is in active development: the akita-sc monorepo's most recent commit landed August 6, 2026, the TypeScript SDK @akta/sdk recorded 621 downloads in the past month on npm, and the project's Discord counts 4,887 members.

For a developer, the platform's pitch is concrete: a subscription is a verifiable on-chain record rather than a database row, so merchants can gate access programmatically — Akita's contract suite includes dedicated subscription-gate and subscription-streak-gate access controls — and billing runs without a payment processor in the middle. For now the evidence of actual paid subscriptions is thin; the infrastructure is real, and Nodely's decision to put its paid tier on it is the clearest signal yet that Akita's escrow model is being treated as a payment rail rather than an experiment.

Source

Source: https://subscriptions.akita.community/service/NDLSAUBQPGGQPUKEFU52VYDXOMZGYJEE5TQOHHOZH6BP7IVNUGSG6IBQHM/1