July was a heavy build month for the NOWNodes team. We shipped two of the biggest additions to the platform this year — a gRPC streaming interface and an MCP server for AI coding assistants — and rounded them out with two new plans, a new network, a free plan bundled with dedicated servers, and several quality-of-life additions that make the day-to-day easier.
This post walks through each release in plain language first, then digs into the details for the people who care about them. Here is the short version of the July 2026 product updates before we go deeper:
- gRPC streaming, live across 25+ networks;
- An MCP server that connects blockchain APIs to AI coding assistants;
- Two new plans — Pro Plus and Business Plus;
- Robinhood Chain, with WebSocket (WSS) and archive access;
- A free Business plan with your first dedicated node;
- Plan usage moved into the account sidebar;
- A public status page for tracking uptime and incidents;
- A new Gwei calculator.
And a look ahead: migration guides for moving from another provider to NOWNodes are on the way. Each release solves a specific problem, so let’s take them one at a time.
gRPC streaming, now live across 25+ networks
Start with the release that matters most if you build anything latency-sensitive. gRPC streaming is a push-based way to receive blockchain data: you open one connection, subscribe to the events you care about, and the node streams every match to you the moment it happens on-chain — no more polling a node on a loop and hoping you catch the update in time.
An MCP server for AI coding assistants
The second big release targets a different bottleneck: the time you lose when you ask an AI assistant to write blockchain code and it invents a method that doesn’t exist. The NOWNodes MCP Server fixes that by handing your assistant documented methods, real examples, and auth rules — so the request it generates is right the first time.
Two new plans: Pro Plus and Business Plus
The old pricing ladder had a big gap in the middle. Pro capped out at 1 million requests a month; the next rung, Business, jumped straight to 30 million. If you outgrew Pro but weren’t running Business-scale traffic, you were stuck overpaying or riding overage fees. Two new tiers close that gap.
| Plan | API keys | Requests / month | Overage per 100k |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | 3 | 1,000,000 | €5 |
| Pro Plus | 5 | 10,000,000 | €5 |
| Business | 25 | 30,000,000 | €1 |
| Business Plus | 25 | 50,000,000 | €1 |
| Enterprise | 100 | 100,000,000 | €0.5 |
Pro Plus gives you 10 million requests and 5 API keys — a 10x jump from Pro without leaping all the way to Business. Business Plus sits above Business at 50 million requests a month, for teams pushing past 30 million but not yet at Enterprise volume. Both include the full toolset — WebSocket connections, market data, gRPC, and MCP — and annual billing takes 10% off any tier. The pricing page has the full comparison.
Robinhood Chain joined NOWNodes, with WSS and archive access
We added Robinhood Chain to the network list this month, and it launched with the advanced tooling already in place rather than as a bare RPC endpoint. You get the EVM JSON-RPC API, a Debug & Trace API for inspecting internal calls, WebSocket (WSS) access for subscribing to new blocks and events without polling, and — the part worth flagging — archive nodes.
Here’s why archive access matters. A standard pruned node keeps only recent state, so historical queries fail past a certain depth. An archive node holds the full chain history, which is what you need for analytics, auditing, or reconstructing any past account state. Uptime runs to the standard 99.95%, and there’s a free START tier covering 100,000 requests a month, so you can connect and test before committing to a paid plan. Both shared and dedicated options are available from day one.
A free Business plan with your first dedicated node
Dedicated servers just got a lot more appealing. Buy your first dedicated node and a Business plan now comes bundled at no extra cost — 30 million shared requests a month, 25 API keys, and the full tool suite, on top of the isolated node itself.
The reasoning is simple. A dedicated node is a fully isolated machine deployed for one customer and one network — no shared rate limits, no noisy neighbors, unlimited requests, 99.99% uptime, and full method access. But most teams also need broad multichain reach for everything around that core workload. Pairing a dedicated node with a shared Business plan covers both from one account, and now the shared half is free with your first node. You configure the node — chain, environment, interface, region — straight from the dashboard.
Plan usage now lives in the sidebar
Not every useful release is a big one. Until now, checking how much of your monthly quota you’d burned meant opening a specific page. Your plan’s usage now sits in the sidebar, visible on every tab of your account dashboard.
It’s a small change with a real payoff: you notice you’re approaching a limit before you hit it, instead of finding out when requests start failing. For anyone managing traffic against a monthly cap — which is most paid users — always-on visibility beats a page you have to remember to open.
A public status page for uptime and incidents
We also put up a status page at status.nownodes.io, so the health of the platform is something you can check yourself instead of asking support. It tracks node, interface, and service uptime, monitors performance, and posts incidents in real time.
Here’s why that helps. When a request starts failing, the first question is always the same — is it my code or the provider? The status page answers it in seconds: you can see at a glance whether an endpoint or interface is degraded, follow an incident as we work through it, and confirm when things are back to normal, without opening a ticket or guessing. It’s the transparency behind our 99.95% uptime SLA, made visible.
It’s most useful for teams running production workloads, where telling a local bug apart from an upstream incident decides how you spend the next ten minutes. Bookmark it next to your dashboard.
A new Gwei calculator
Last of the shipped releases is a Gwei calculator: a page that converts between Wei, Gwei, and ETH, with the context to explain why those units exist at all.
The short version: Ethereum counts everything in wei, the smallest unit, where one ETH equals 10¹⁸ wei — a 1 followed by eighteen zeros. Gwei is a billion wei, and it exists for one job: pricing gas in a number a human can actually read. Quoted in wei, a gas price is a ten-digit figure; quoted in ETH, it’s a row of leading zeros. “18 gwei” sits in the readable middle. Those mechanics changed with EIP-1559, which shipped in Ethereum’s London upgrade on 5 August 2021 and replaced blind gas auctions with a protocol-set base fee plus an optional tip. A plain ETH transfer is still fixed at 21,000 gas. The calculator handles the conversions so you don’t count zeros by hand — the kind of slip that turns 2 ETH into 0.2 ETH with one dropped digit.
Wrapping up: a build-heavy month
July’s releases split cleanly by who they serve. If you run real-time or high-volume infrastructure, gRPC streaming and the two new plan tiers give you lower latency and a smoother path to scale. If you build with an AI assistant in the loop, the MCP server takes the guesswork out of generating blockchain calls. And if you’re just getting set up, Robinhood Chain, the bundled Business plan, sidebar usage, the status page, and the Gwei calculator smooth out the edges.
None of it requires migrating off what you already use — every release is additive. The fastest way to try any of it is to log into your account: the sidebar usage view is already there, the new plans sit on the pricing page, and gRPC, MCP, and Robinhood Chain are ready to connect with the API key you already have. We publish these roundups every month, so check back for the next set — and as always, tell us which networks and tools you want next. That list is how most of them end up here.
