Introduction to Consumers

What is a Consumer?

A Consumer is a participant in the SubQuery Network and is either an individual or organisation that pays for processed and organised blockchain data and/or RPC queries from the SubQuery Network. Consumers effectively make requests to the SubQuery Network for specific data or the ability to submit transactions to RPC providers and pay an agreed amount of SQT in return.

Consumers are typically dApp (decentralised application) developers, data analytic companies, blockchain networks, middleware developers, or even web aggregating companies that need access to blockchain data or performant RPCs to provide services to their end-users.

Requirements to be a Consumer

There are no requirements as such to become a SubQuery Consumer. However, Consumers will need to understand how to obtain SQT, how to advertise their data requirements and how to consume the JSON data returned.

Learn how to create plans and start making requests here.

Benefits of being a Consumer

As a Consumer, you can interact with performant RPCs or receive indexed data from the Network for your dApps. Other benefits include:

• Faster performance for your dApps. Since your dApps an get data from a decentralised network of Node Operators (RPCs or data indexers), the average latency will be lower and performance higher
• Higher reliability. Due to the decentralised nature of the network, your dApp can immediately fall back to an alternative when an RPC provider goes offline.
• Focus on developing your application, not on running blockchain infrastructure.
• Cost effective. Combining the two points from above, consuming data from SubQuery results in a very cost effective way to power your applications.

Costs to being a Consumer

The cost of making RPC calls or querying indexed data on the network will be based on supply and demand and ideally will be lower than other similar centralised and decentralised services currently available. The advantage of an open and transparent network and ecosystem is that competition is encouraged to provide the best service to the Consumer.

For flexibility, Consumers have multiple payment options to pay for blockchain data and RPC queries, you can read more about these, how they work, and the advantages/disadvantages on the Payment Methods article.