Your Agent Has Free Trials.
Here's How to Go Paid in 60 Seconds.

⚠️ Update (2026-09-11): this post predates the 2026-09-06 retirement of the deposit-and-credit rail. Sending USDC to the platform wallet no longer credits a balance — after your 5 free trial calls, each call is paid individually over x402. See the payment docs.

318 agents are using minia2a's free trials. 42 have wallets. If you're in the 276 — this is the guide that gets you from "just trying" to "autonomously paying" in three steps. Real code, real prices, no fluff.

318

trial users

100%

→

with wallets

13.2%

→

723

credits spent

24% of bought

What Happens When Your Trials Run Out

Every endpoint on minia2a gives you 5 free trial calls. per registered wallet. After trial 5, you get an HTTP 402 Payment Required. Here's what that looks like:

HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "error": "payment_required",
  "message": "Free trial limit reached (5/5). Register a wallet for 5 free trials.",
  "register": "POST /api/v1/register-simple",
  "price": "1 credit ($0.005)"
}

That 402 is not a dead end. It's the moment your agent becomes autonomous. Here's how to cross it.

Step 1: Register — Get 5 Free Trials (10 seconds)

One command. That's it.

# Self-custody: generate your own wallet, then sign EIP-191 "minia2a register: ".
curl -X POST https://minia2a.uk/api/v1/register-simple \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"my-agent","wallet":"0xYOUR_WALLET","signature":"0xYOUR_SIGNATURE"}'

What you get back:

{
  "ok": true,
  "trials": 5,
  "message": "5 free trial calls credited to 0xYOUR_WALLET"
}

5 trial calls = $2.50 in API calls. Most endpoints cost 1-2 credits ($0.005-$0.01). That's 250-500 paid API calls before you spend a cent of your own money.

Step 2: Make Paid Calls — Exactly Like Free Trials (10 seconds)

Same endpoints, just add your wallet

During free trials, you called:

curl https://minia2a.uk/x402/gas

For paid calls, append your wallet address:

export WALLET=0xYOUR_WALLET SERVICE=x402-gas TS=$(date +%s)
export SIG=0xYOUR_SIGNATURE   # EIP-191 personal_sign of: minia2a trial:$WALLET:$SERVICE:$TS
curl "https://minia2a.uk/x402/gas?wallet=$WALLET" \
  -H "X-Wallet-Signature: $SIG" -H "X-Trial-Timestamp: $TS"

That's the only difference. The response comes back identical — same JSON structure, same data. The payment happens in the HTTP layer via x402. Your agent code doesn't change.

Check your trial state anytime: V5 has no per-wallet balance endpoint (/api/v1/credits → 404) — remaining trial calls come back in each 402 response, platform stats at /api/stats:

curl "https://minia2a.uk/api/stats"

Step 3: Pay Per Call When the Trial Runs Out (30 seconds)

There is no top-up. Do not send USDC to a minia2a address.

Retired 2026-09-06. The credits rail is gone. POST /api/v1/buy-credits returns 404, and USDC sent to a minia2a address is not credited — there is no deposit channel and no balance to spend it from. The address that used to be printed here was a pre-funding address; it is not one now.

What works instead: keep the USDC in your own agent's wallet and pay per call over x402. The endpoint answers 402 with a base64 PAYMENT-REQUIRED header naming the price and payTo; you settle that offer and retry with a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header. No balance, no deposit, no withdrawal.

# Pay per call — no wallet param, no registration, no top-up
curl -i "https://minia2a.uk/x402/gas"        # 402 + base64 PAYMENT-REQUIRED
# ... settle that offer against payTo, then retry the same URL with:
curl "https://minia2a.uk/x402/gas" -H "PAYMENT-SIGNATURE: $SIGNATURE"

What Agents Actually Spend On (Real Data)

Here's what the 723 credits actually spent on minia2a went toward — ranked by usage:

Endpoint	Trials	Users	What it does
`x402-captcha-solve`	856	133	Solve CAPTCHAs — agents navigating human web infra
`x402-gas`	509	116	L1/L2 gas prices — tx planning
`x402-recall`	500	33	Agent memory stack — 15.9 calls/user (stickiest)
`x402-find`	491	59	Web search for agents
`x402-web-scrape`	305	61	Structured web scraping
`x402-token-security`	145	39	Token contract security audit
`x402-polymarket`	198	30	Prediction market odds

Pattern: Gateway endpoints (CAPTCHA, gas) acquire users. Data endpoints (recall, find) retain them. The agents that stick around build pipelines combining both.

The Pricing: Cheaper Than You Think

Tier	Credits	Cost	Calls (avg)	Cost per call
Free trial	500	$0	250-500	$0.00
Micro top-up	1,000	$5 USDC	500-1,000	$0.005-0.01
Regular	5,000	$25 USDC	2,500-5,000	$0.005-0.01
Power agent	20,000	$100 USDC	10,000-20,000	$0.005-0.01

For comparison: a single OpenAI GPT-4o API call costs $0.0025-0.01 per 1K tokens. Your agent's data infrastructure (gas prices, web scraping, token security) costs less than the LLM thinking about it.

Why Go Paid? The Free Tier Ceiling

Free tier limits that block real agents

5 calls per registered wallet — for the whole catalog, not per endpoint. That's enough to test. It's not enough to build. A real agent making decisions every 5 minutes hits that in 75 minutes, and evaluating three services eats it three times faster.

No spending controls. Free tier has no per-call budget caps, no daily limits, no multi-agent wallet management. Your agent is either free or blocked — there's no "spend up to $1/day" setting.

402 walls break autonomy. An agent that hits a 402 and stops is not autonomous. An agent with a funded wallet that pays $0.005 and continues is.

The 60-Second Checklist

Copy, paste, done.

# 1. Register (10s) — self-custody: sign EIP-191 "minia2a register: "
curl -X POST https://minia2a.uk/api/v1/register-simple \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"my-agent","wallet":"0xYOUR_WALLET","signature":"0xYOUR_SIGNATURE"}'

# 2. Use your credits (10s)
export WALLET=0xYOUR_WALLET SERVICE=x402-gas TS=$(date +%s)
export SIG=0xYOUR_SIGNATURE   # EIP-191 personal_sign of: minia2a trial:$WALLET:$SERVICE:$TS
curl "https://minia2a.uk/x402/gas?wallet=$WALLET" \
  -H "X-Wallet-Signature: $SIG" -H "X-Trial-Timestamp: $TS"

# 3. When the trial runs out (30s) — there is no top-up.
# Do NOT send USDC to a minia2a address: it is not credited.
# Keep the funds in your own wallet and pay per call over x402:
curl -i "https://minia2a.uk/x402/gas"   # 402 + PAYMENT-REQUIRED offer

Your agent is waiting at trial #14.

The difference between a demo and a deployed agent is one HTTP 402. Cross it.

# Self-custody: sign EIP-191 "minia2a register: ".
curl -X POST https://minia2a.uk/api/v1/register-simple \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"my-agent","wallet":"0xYOUR_WALLET","signature":"0xYOUR_SIGNATURE"}'

Your Agent Has Free Trials.Here's How to Go Paid in 60 Seconds.