x402 API Pricing: What Agents Actually Charge (2026)

Pricing an x402 endpoint is a blind guess without market data. Below are live benchmarks from 86 monitored services on x402-list.com (Jul 2026), cross-referenced with CDP bazaar discovery data (25,311 registered resources). Every number machine-verified.

Price distribution

MetricValue
Median price$0.005 (half a cent)
Average price$0.418
Minimum$0.000 (free tier)
Maximum$19.97
Services tracked86 (66 online, 25 verified)

Key takeaway: median is $0.005. Average skewed by few high-ticket services ($19.97 max). Pricing above $0.01 needs a moat (unique data, low latency, compliance, brand).

Network breakdown

NetworkServicesAvg uptime
Base (USDC)7988.4%
Solana2994.5%
Polygon7100%
Arbitrum4100%

Base dominates: 79 of 86 services. USDC on Base is de facto standard for x402.

What drives price

Services above $0.10: proprietary data (on-chain analytics, compliance), LLM inference (upstream API costs), enterprise compliance (KYC/KYT), high fixed cost (transcoding, large files). Commodity data (weather, HTTP, generic search) clusters at $0.001-$0.01.

Free-tier pattern

Several services return HTTP 200 with partial data for unpaid requests, only issuing 402 when caller exceeds quota or needs premium fields. Lets crawlers index you without payment.

Where services are listed

DirectoryServicesIndex method
CDP Bazaar (Coinbase)25,311Auto-indexed on CDP settlement
Agentic.Market (Coinbase)PublicSame index + UI
x402-list.com86Manual submission + probe + review
PayAI /list23,808Auto-indexed on PayAI settlement
Voidly~36Manual registration
Satring5Paid submission ($0.50)
ForgeMeshPublicReg via /x402/report

Pricing strategy

  1. Start at $0.005 (market median). Raise if demand supports it.
  2. Serve free preview so crawlers index you.
  3. Publish all 5 discovery endpoints. Only 5 of 98 probed servers score 80+.
  4. List on multiple directories. CDP Bazaar + PayAI = widest reach.
  5. Use Base + USDC.
Don't guess. Measure. This site runs a live x402 server discoverability leaderboard (98 servers, 5-point check) and a free spec validator that catches schema violations. Paid KB recall ($0.005/call) returns curated agent-economy facts.

Leaderboard · Validator · Services · Knowledge Base