Rollup-as-a-Service evaluated across who can change your chain, a price you can act on before you talk to sales, the documented way out, and independently counted live chains.
KA
#1 of 8 · published ranking
Karnot
79ChainChoice Score
4199
Why it leads
Best in the pool on key custody onchain and published price
Cost
Not priced· No comparable price is published
No provider can pay for a position in this table. The code that computes this order cannot read which links earn us a commission, and every build proves it. Every score below rebuilds from the published criteria.Ranking 2026.08 · 4 criteria · 8 products · same inputs, same order
Personal comparison
Rollup-as-a-Service ranked comparison
No comparable price is published; ranking still uses verified product evidence.
RankProviderBest fitScore
1
KAKarnotStarknet appchains on the Madara sequen...Top ranked
A price you can act on before you talk to sales — 9/10Trade-off: Karnot is the only vendor that tells you the price before the call — $5,000/month, ab...
Ranked on 4 published criteria weighted 35/25/20/20, which set goal alignment — 30 of the 86 points. The rest: regional access 20, evidence depth 18, ease of use 10, institutional trust 8. Profile match is shown in breakdowns but carries no weight.
Audit
Infrastructure
Methodology
2026.09.15
published 2026-09-16
Providers tracked
980+
across 119 categories
Last verified
2026-09-25
newest dated pricing or sentiment read
Named on the roster
2 people
managing directors · 6 automated processes
Decision guide
What matters most before choosing in this category
Treat the upgrade key as the whole decision, because it is the only part that is an on-chain fact rather than a promise. Across the chains these vendors have launched, the multisig that can change the chain is frequently the vendor's own, and one Conduit multisig alone holds bridge-upgrade rights on eight live chains. Second, ask for a price before you ask for a demo: only Karnot, the smallest vendor here, publishes a mainnet monthly figure, and Conduit publishes a rate card — the rest price by conversation. Third, get the exit in writing. And weigh the operating record honestly: of the chains L2BEAT badges to this category, exactly half are archived, so the question is not whether a vendor can launch a chain but whether the ones it launched are still running.
What matters most before choosing in this category
Treat the upgrade key as the whole decision, because it is the only part that is an on-chain fact rather than a promise. Across the chains these vendors have launched, the multisig that can change the chain is frequently the vendor's own, and one Conduit multisig alone holds bridge-upgrade rights on eight live chains. Second, ask for a price before you ask for a demo: only Karnot, the smallest vendor here, publishes a mainnet monthly figure, and Conduit publishes a rate card — the rest price by conversation. Third, get the exit in writing. And weigh the operating record honestly: of the chains L2BEAT badges to this category, exactly half are archived, so the question is not whether a vendor can launch a chain but whether the ones it launched are still running.
Which multisig can upgrade your chain on day one, and whose signers are in it?
Can you get a price you can budget against without entering a sales cycle?
Is there a written key-handover procedure, and have you read it before deploying?
Current editor lead
Expert review and scoring weights
KA
KarnotData checked Sep 2026
Starknet appchains on the Madara sequencer stack, with a published monthly mainnet price
Starknet appchains on the Madara sequencer stack, with a published monthly mainnet price. Strongest on a price you can act on before you talk to sales (9/10): Karnot's homepage prices its mainnet tier at "$5000" "/ month" for growing teams, beside a free devnet and testnet tier; the mainnet tier lists automatic upgrades, high uptime, detailed monitoring, on-call support and customisations. It is the only mainnet chain price in fiat on the page where a buyer signs up. Weakest on the documented way out (4/10): Karnot's site carries no key-handover or migration-out statement and no documentation index. What it does state is stack independence: it maintains the open-source Madara framework and tells customers to "Choose your preferred settlement and DA layers." Published price: karnot.xyz (re-fetched 2026-09-25, HTTP 200; karnot.xyz/pricing returns HTTP 404, so the price lives on the homepage), pricing section, quoted exactly. DEVNET AND TESTNETS: "Free" / "For the tinkerers" — "Sequencer Explorer Bridge Faucet Dashboard".
Best forA price you can act on before you talk to sales — 9/10
Main tradeoffKarnot is the only vendor that tells you the price before the call — $5,000/month, above the $3,000/month implied by Conduit's own blog — but it is Starknet-only, has exactly one chain L2BEAT tracks, publishes no uptime measurement or status page, and makes no written commitment to hand you the keys. You are buying price transparency and clean on-chain custody on a sample of one, and taking the operating record on faith.
Verify before signupkarnot.xyz (re-fetched 2026-09-25, HTTP 200; karnot.xyz/pricing returns HTTP 404, so the price lives on the homepage), pricing section, quoted exactly. DEVNET AND TESTNETS: "Free" / "For the tinkerers" — "Sequencer Explorer Bridge Faucet Dashboard". MAINNET: "$5000" "/ month" / "For growing teams" — "EVERYTHING IN TESTNET, PLUS: Automatic upgrades High uptime Detailed monitoring On call support Customisations". Normalised on 2026-09-25: 5,000 a month x 12 = 60,000 a year in US dollars, all-in for the listed components, with no revenue share attached. The only other vendor-stated mainnet figure in this pool is on a different vendor's blog — conduit.xyz/blog/rollup-total-cost-of-operations-tco (re-fetched 2026-09-25, HTTP 200) still states a cost of thirty-six thousand dollars per year to run a rollup on mainnet plus onchain DA costs, i.e. 3,000 a month — and that figure is contradicted by Conduit's own pricing page, which quotes every mainnet chain tier as Contact for pricing plus five percent of sequencer profit. Karnot's 5,000 a month therefore remains the only mainnet monthly price in this pool published on the page where you would buy it. Both figures were re-fetched on the same day, 2026-09-25, so the comparison is same-date.
Methodology
How this category is reviewed
Reviewed on who can change your chain, a price you can act on before you talk to sales, the documented way out, and independently counted live chains.
The order on this page is the published ranking for this category. Every criterion, weight and source behind it is on the methodology page.
Frequently asked
Questions people ask before choosing raas
Who actually controls a chain launched through one of these vendors?
Read the upgrade multisig rather than the marketing, because it is public. Across the chains L2BEAT tracks for these vendors, the address able to upgrade the chain is often the vendor's own multisig rather than the team's, and a single Conduit multisig with a four-of-ten threshold appears across twenty-six tracked chains and holds bridge-upgrade rights on eight live ones. That is not necessarily wrong — an early team may genuinely want the vendor operating it — but it should be a decision you made rather than one you discover, and it is why custody carries the heaviest weight here.
Why do so few of these vendors publish a price?
Because the category sells to teams in a procurement cycle rather than to buyers reading a page. Karnot publishes a monthly mainnet figure on its homepage and Conduit publishes a rate card; every other vendor in this pool publishes no chain price at all. One caution the research turned up: a headline deposit figure on one vendor's page is a testnet deposit whose tokens the same page tells you to get free from a faucet, so a number being printed is not the same as a number you can budget against.
How likely is it that my chain outlives the vendor relationship?
Less likely than the category implies. Counting the chains L2BEAT badges to these vendors at a pinned repository commit and recounting them independently gives 44 live against 44 archived — exactly half the fleet is dead. Archived does not always mean failed; testnets and deliberate wind-downs are in there too. But it does mean the base rate for a launched chain still running is around one in two, which is the number to plan a migration path against rather than the vendor's launch count.
Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research
//Analytics consent·GDPR · ePrivacy · TTDSG
ChainChoice measures page views and conversions with two cookieless, EU-hosted services: Plausible and Cloudflare Web Analytics. Nothing loads until you accept, and rankings are identical either way.ChainChoice measures how the engine is used — page views, conversions, referrer — through two cookieless, EU-hosted services: Plausible and Cloudflare Web Analytics. No advertising cookies, no cross-site profile, no data resale. Neither script loads until you accept, and rankings are identical whether you accept or decline.
