TL;DR: Passing a historical blockNumber to eth_call , eth_getBalance or eth_getLogs silently routes your request to the archive tier of hosted RPC providers. In our production metrics, archive calls cost on average 26.7x more compute units than the same call at latest . This post explains why, shows the exact client code pattern that triggers it, and gives you three Prometheus queries to measure your own archive exposure in under a minute. Full cross provider measurements are publishe...