Solana gRPC Alternatives: How DEX Firehose Compares to Helius and Bitquery (2026)

An honest comparison of the three main Solana real-time trade data options — Helius LaserStream, Bitquery, and the MadeOnSol DEX Firehose — by price, DEX coverage, latency, and what you actually get for the money.

MadeOnSol·April 16, 2026· 8 min read

Solana gRPC Alternatives: How DEX Firehose Compares to Helius and Bitquery (2026)

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you sign up through them, MadeOnSol may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This never affects our rankings, ratings, or reviews.

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Skip the Geyser pipeline — embed KOL flow, deployer reputation, and the all-DEX firehose over REST, WebSocket, or webhooks. The Business tier (€400/mo) is the self-serve embed license at 500k calls/day — Enterprise adds white-label & redistribution.

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import { MadeOnSol } from "madeonsol";

// Get a free API key at madeonsol.com/pricing
const client = new MadeOnSol({ apiKey: "msk_your_key" });

const { trades } = await client.kol.feed({ limit: 10 });
const { alerts } = await client.deployer.alerts({ limit: 5 });
const { tools } = await client.tools.search({ q: "trading" });

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Best Solana Data Indexers: The Graph vs Helius Webhooks vs Yellowstone gRPC (2026)

Compare Solana's top data indexing solutions. We break down The Graph, Helius Webhooks, and Yellowstone gRPC for real-time and historical data.

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Multi-subscription per connection

You can run up to 10 named subscriptions on a single WebSocket connection. Each subscription has its own filters and its own sub_id echoed back on every matched trade so you can route them locally:

ws.send(JSON.stringify({ type: "subscribe", sub_id: "snipers", filters: { token_age_max_seconds: 60 } }));
ws.send(JSON.stringify({ type: "subscribe", sub_id: "whales",  filters: { min_sol: 50 } }));
ws.send(JSON.stringify({ type: "subscribe", sub_id: "kol-mints", filters: { token_mints: [...] } }));

Three logical streams, one connection. You can also update a subscription's filters in-place without disconnecting, or unsubscribe individual subs.

Historical replay

On subscribe you can pass replay: 100 (up to 500) and the server will immediately send back the most recent matching trades from its in-memory ring buffer, tagged with replay: true. This makes "warm start" trivially easy — your bot has the last few minutes of context the moment it connects, not after waiting for live trades to populate.

This is in-memory only and bounded. For deeper backfill, hit the REST endpoints (/api/v1/kol/feed, /api/v1/wallet-tracker/trades, etc.) for stored history.

When you should pick something else

You need every event from every program, including non-DEX activity (NFT mints, airdrops, governance). Go with Helius — the firehose only ships trade events from DEX programs.
Your business runs on historical SQL queries, not just real-time. Bitquery's archival product is years deep and queryable; we keep 24h of in-memory price aggregation and 180 days of stored KOL trades.
You need a custom parser for a brand-new program nobody supports yet. Raw Yellowstone is the right tool — you can ship the parser yourself. Renting that raw feed instead of running your own validator is usually the cheaper path, and our Chainstack Solana RPC review of its Yellowstone gRPC add-on pricing breaks down what that costs across tiers.

For everything else — sniper bots, copy traders, alert services, analytics dashboards, token launch monitors — the price/feature delta is hard to justify against the Firehose.

Latency reality check

All three providers tap Yellowstone gRPC near the cluster. The wire-level latency difference between them is in the tens of milliseconds, dominated by which datacenter you connect from. We run dual gRPC streams (Frankfurt + New York), dedupe across them, and broadcast over a direct WebSocket on the same Hetzner core that hosts the rest of the platform — meaning your filter evaluation happens in the same process that received the gRPC frame. There is no Kafka hop, no GraphQL planner, no inter-region message bus.

The three options at a glance

	MadeOnSol DEX Firehose	Helius LaserStream	Bitquery Streaming
Entry price	€131/mo, ≈ $149 (Ultra)	$499/mo (Business)	$599/mo (Growth)
Mid-tier price	included	$999–$1,999/mo	$1,499–$2,999/mo
Transport	WebSocket (normalized)	Yellowstone gRPC (raw)	Kafka / WebSocket / GraphQL
DEX programs	9+ pre-parsed	All — you parse	All — they parse
Latency	sub-second	sub-second	sub-second
Filtering	server-side, multi-sub	server-side, raw	GraphQL / SQL
Historical replay	500-trade in-memory	requires backfill plan	full history extra cost
Setup time	5 minutes	1–3 days (parser code)	1–2 days (schema)

MadeOnSol DEX Firehose

Helius LaserStream

Bitquery Streaming

Entry price

€131/mo, ≈ $149 (Ultra)

$499/mo (Business)

$599/mo (Growth)

Mid-tier price

included

$999–$1,999/mo

$1,499–$2,999/mo

Transport

WebSocket (normalized)

Yellowstone gRPC (raw)

Kafka / WebSocket / GraphQL

DEX programs

9+ pre-parsed

All — you parse

All — they parse

Latency

sub-second

Filtering

server-side, multi-sub

server-side, raw

GraphQL / SQL

Historical replay

500-trade in-memory

requires backfill plan

full history extra cost

Setup time

5 minutes

1–3 days (parser code)

1–2 days (schema)

Prices are pulled from each provider's public pricing pages as of April 2026. Bitquery and Helius both negotiate enterprise contracts; the table reflects self-serve tiers.

What you actually get

Helius LaserStream

You get raw Yellowstone gRPC access. That is the same protocol Solana validators use to publish state, and it is a serious piece of infrastructure — sub-second latency, no parsing layer in the way, and you can subscribe to anything (accounts, transactions, slots). The catch is that you also have to write the parser. Every new DEX program you want to support is a few hundred lines of Rust or TypeScript that has to handle pre/post token balances, ATA detection, bonding-curve quirks, and program-version differences.

If you have a parsing team and want maximum flexibility, this is the right choice. If you are building a sniper bot in a weekend, you will spend most of that weekend on parsing.

Bitquery Streaming

You get parsed trades across every DEX they support, addressable via GraphQL or SQL. Their schema is rich — wallet enrichment, token metadata, USD pricing — and their historical product is genuinely good. The two friction points: GraphQL subscriptions have higher per-event overhead than raw WebSocket frames (matters at firehose volume), and the pricing tiers are designed for funded teams, not solo builders.

If you need historical SQL alongside real-time, Bitquery is hard to beat. If you are watching for fresh launches in real time and counting your monthly burn, the price is steep.

MadeOnSol DEX Firehose

You get a single normalized WebSocket on wss://madeonsol.com/ws/v1/dex-stream that streams parsed trades from all 9+ supported programs. Server-side filters do the work of saying "only fresh Pump.fun launches under 5 minutes old, buy side only, minimum 0.5 SOL" — so your bot receives the trades it cares about and nothing else. The code looks like this:

That is the entire integration. No parser, no schema design, no enterprise contract.

Server-side filter dimensions

This is where DEX Firehose differs most from raw gRPC. You do not have to receive 5,000 trades per second and filter client-side. Available filters:

token_mint(s) — up to 50 mints per subscription

wallet(s) — up to 50 wallets per subscription

dex — single value or array (pumpfun, pumpamm, raydium, jupiter, orca, meteora, launchlab, pumpswap)

deployer_tier — elite, good, moderate, rising, cold, unranked (uses our Deployer Hunter tier system, single value or array)

token_age_max_seconds — only trades on mints first seen within the window

market_cap_max_sol / market_cap_min_sol — bounded by current market cap in SOL

min_sol / max_sol — trade size bounds

action — buy or sell

Filters compose. A single subscription can require all of: PumpAMM-only + token under 1 hour old + market cap under 100 SOL + buys only + minimum 0.3 SOL. Trades that fail any condition are dropped server-side and never hit your socket.

Provider	Monthly cost for the above
MadeOnSol DEX Firehose (Ultra)	€131 (≈ $149)
Helius (Business + dev time for parser)	$499 + parsing engineering
Bitquery (Growth)	$599

Solana gRPC Alternatives: How DEX Firehose Compares to Helius and Bitquery (2026)

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Multi-subscription per connection

Historical replay

When you should pick something else

Latency reality check

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The three options at a glance

What you actually get

Helius LaserStream

Bitquery Streaming

MadeOnSol DEX Firehose

Server-side filter dimensions

Pricing math for a working bot

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