How Gas Manager credits work on Pay As You Go plans

On a Pay As You Go (PAYG) plan, gas sponsorship works differently than it does on Enterprise. This article covers how credits are funded, monitored, and shared across your team.

Allowlist for gas sponsorship on EVM networks

Gas sponsorship on Pay As You Go plans across all EVM networks requires your team to be allowlisted. Teams that are not allowlisted will not be able to sponsor gas. Alchemy is allowlisting eligible teams ahead of enforcement.

If your sponsored transactions are being rejected on an EVM network, or you'd like to request access, contact support@alchemy.com with your team ID, the networks you sponsor on, and your expected volume.

Why gas sponsorship still requires pre-funding on Pay As You Go

The "Pay As You Go" plan name describes how standard API usage (compute units) is billed: you pay after usage, with no upfront commitment. Gas sponsorship is billed differently, because Alchemy is fronting real onchain gas on your behalf. On PAYG, that means keeping a prepaid Gas Manager balance so sponsorship spend is covered before it happens. Enterprise plans can instead settle gas sponsorship after the fact through a post-pay limit.

Pre-funding is required

On PAYG, you must pre-deposit funds into your Gas Manager balance before Alchemy can sponsor gas for your users. There is no post-pay limit that gets settled at the end of the billing period. If your balance runs out, sponsorship requests will fail until more credits are added, so keep this in mind if you are moving from an Enterprise plan, where a post-pay limit was available.

No automatic top-ups

Alchemy does not currently offer automatic top-ups or scheduled credit purchases for the Gas Manager. You'll need to add credits manually from the Gas Manager Dashboard. Because of this, it's best to deposit with a buffer based on your average monthly sponsorship spend rather than topping up close to your limit.

Usage alerts

Your account's billing admin emails automatically receive notifications at 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of your usage limit, so you can see a shortage coming before it affects users.

Credits roll over

Unused Gas Manager credits roll over from month to month rather than expiring at the end of the billing period.

Credits are shared across apps

Gas Manager credits are pooled at the team level and shared across all of your apps and policies, including across different chains. There is currently no way to allocate a separate credit balance to a specific app, chain, or policy — that isolation would require a separate Alchemy account.

To limit how much any one chain or app can draw from the shared pool, set a max spend cap on that chain's policy — see How to limit Gas Manager policy spend. This doesn't create a separate balance, but it does bound how much that policy can spend before its own sponsorship stops, which protects the rest of the shared pool from being drained by a single chain or app.

Monitoring usage

Your overall Gas Manager credit balance is only visible in the Gas Manager Dashboard, it is not currently available through an API. To monitor sponsorship activity for a specific policy programmatically, use the Gas Manager Admin API's get-policy-stats endpoint.