I thought I saw one of the many blockchain browsers that allowed some of the bitcoind RPC commands like "getinfo" or "getmempoolinfo" through.  Basically a public facing bitcoind server.  I'm sure that under the covers the RPC calls are proxied and throttled, but I could have sworn one of the big providers was offering this.  Don't think it was blockchain.info, but someone.

Any thoughts?

My goal, if you ask, is to work a python script using "estimatefee" and "estimatepriority" to provide some feedback to current mempool transactions.