Backfill the whole chain.
The bill stays the same.
Indexing is the workload metered plans punish hardest: millions of archive reads, trace calls on every block, and a credit budget that dies on day two of a backfill. On a dedicated archive node, a full historical crawl costs exactly what an idle month costs.
What your node is tuned for.
Do the math on your last backfill.
Take the request count from your last historical sync and price it on any metered plan. Then compare a flat month of the Archive band. For most indexers the crossover happened long before they switched; they were paying a per-request tax on data they could have owned the pipe to.
There is a second cost metered plans hide: retry logic. Rate-limited pipelines spend engineering time on backoff, batching around caps, and partial-failure recovery. A node with no caps deletes that whole class of code.
Reorgs, resyncs and client upgrades are on us; your pipeline just reads. Live p50/p99 in the dashboard tells you when the bottleneck is your code, not the node.
Bring the chain. Bring the query shape.
We spec the archive node, the client and the city. Firm quote within the hour.