CoinMarketCap API alternatives that are better & more usable these days?

I signed up for the coinmarketcap API because its free tier offers more call credits than most. But after making a few historical data pulls, I burned through the credits much faster than expected.

I only found out afterward that cmc doesn’t always charge one credit per request. The number of credits used can increase depending on how much data is returned.

Is there practical ways or implementation strategies around their credit model limitations that can help extend effective usage of cmc's API? I’m also wondering whether I should simply just migrate to another provider before building any further.

coingecko API seems like the obvious alternative and I’ve heard good things about it, but I haven’t explored it much and don’t want to run into the same problem as cmc again. Would you recommend switching to coingecko, or are there any other good alternatives worth considering?