Alchemy Gas Manager is Alchemy's hosted paymaster service for ERC-4337 smart accounts. It lets your application pay the gas for your users' transactions, so they can use your product without first buying ETH. Instead of writing and running your own paymaster contract, you define policies in Alchemy's dashboard and request sponsorship through its API.
How It Works
- You create a gas policy with rules: which chains, which contracts, maximum spend per user and in total, and time windows.
- When a user acts, your app or backend asks Gas Manager to sponsor the UserOperation under that policy.
- If the operation fits the rules, Gas Manager signs its paymaster data, and a bundler submits it.
- Gas is paid from your Alchemy balance; spending is visible per policy.
What We Take Care Of
- Policy design that matches your business model: sponsor onboarding and key actions, not everything, so costs stay predictable and abuse is limited.
- Abuse protection: per-user limits, allow-listed contracts and, where needed, a backend check before sponsorship, so bots cannot drain your gas budget.
- Integration with your smart accounts, whether from Alchemy's Account Kit or another implementation.
- Monitoring of spend and failed sponsorships, with alerts before the budget runs out.
- Fallback: a second paymaster provider or your own, so sponsorship continues if one service is unavailable.
Alchemy or Another Paymaster?
Gas Manager is a practical choice if you already use Alchemy for nodes or smart accounts. Alternatives include Biconomy, other providers, or a custom paymaster when you need rules no hosted service supports, such as gas paid in your own token. For every method of removing gas costs, see gasless transactions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do users need ETH at all?
Not for sponsored actions. For actions outside your policy, they pay gas themselves or you offer payment in a token.
Can we limit how much we spend?
Yes. Policies support limits per user, per operation and in total, and we add alerts and backend checks on top.
Are we locked in to Alchemy?
Not if the integration is built behind your own interface; switching or adding a paymaster provider is then a contained change.
Who owns the code?
Ownership of the source code is set out in the contract, and the code can be fully yours, including documentation and tests.
Part of our work on paymasters and account abstraction.
Sponsor Gas Without Losing Control
Tell us which user actions you want to make free. We will set up sponsorship with limits that fit your budget.