Issue with Cannot Estimate Gas Error

Ethers Version

5.4.7

Search Terms

No response

Describe the Problem

Apologize that there isn’t a better category for opening this question/issue:

I wanted to know why I need to provide gas price or gas limit overrides for an external/view contract function if they don’t require gas and are not being performed inside another transaction? And, no other processing is occurring in the function but returning contract state variables.

function getDetails() external view returns ( uint256, uint256, uint256, address, uint256 )

I encountered the “cannot estimate gas; transaction may fail or may require manual gas limit” error originally. It also required that I use a signer and not just a provider when creating the contract instance.

To make it worse, once I switched to a signer, and provided those overrides

const overrides = { gasPrice: ethers.utils.parseUnits(“50000000000”, “wei”), gasLimit: ethers.utils.parseUnits(“100000000000”, “wei”) };

const response = await contract.getDetails(overrides);

I receive an insufficient funds error (Rinkeby) when I have .6 ETH on the account:

Error: insufficient funds for intrinsic transaction cost [ See: https://links.ethers.org/v5-errors-INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS ] (error={“code”:-32000,“message”:“err: insufficient funds for gas * price + value: address 0xc0Eb169794B18685a67C0a998292D184Ddeaeba3 have 600000000000000000 want 200000000000000000000000 (supplied gas 500000000)”}, method=“call”, transaction={“from”:“0xc0Eb169794B18685a67C0a998292D184Ddeaeba3”,“gasLimit”:{“type”:“BigNumber”,“hex”:“0x058d15e176280000”},“gasPrice”:{“type”:“BigNumber”,“hex”:“0x016bcc41e90000”},“to”:“0x5FbDB2315678afecb367f032d93F642f64180aa3”,“data”:“0x936afab3”,“accessList”:null}, code=INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS, version=providers/5.4.5)

Code Snippet

const overrides = {
            gasPrice: ethers.utils.parseUnits("50000000000", "wei"),
            gasLimit: ethers.utils.parseUnits("100000000000", "wei")
};

const response = await contract.getDetails(overrides);

Contract ABI

No response

Errors

Error: insufficient funds for intrinsic transaction cost [ See: https://links.ethers.org/v5-errors-INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS ] (error={"code":-32000,"message":"err: insufficient funds for gas * price + value: address 0xc0Eb169794B18685a67C0a998292D184Ddeaeba3 have 600000000000000000 want 200000000000000000000000 (supplied gas 500000000)"}, method="call", transaction={"from":"0xc0Eb169794B18685a67C0a998292D184Ddeaeba3","gasLimit":{"type":"BigNumber","hex":"0x058d15e176280000"},"gasPrice":{"type":"BigNumber","hex":"0x016bcc41e90000"},"to":"0x5FbDB2315678afecb367f032d93F642f64180aa3","data":"0x936afab3","accessList":null}, code=INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS, version=providers/5.4.5)

Environment

Hardhat

Environment (Other)

No response

[hyndsite]

Yep. Thanks @ricmoo

[hyndsite]

Thanks @bobanm for the help and the honest feedback.