← Would Pay Again · All issues

We checked eight x402 weather vendors' listed prices against what they actually charged. Two were wrong, one in each direction.

On September 22 we found a tool on x402.freeq.one that billed $0.019 for a real call while a public directory listing for that same tool says $0.05 flat. One tool, one gap. This week we checked how common that gap is by asking the same weather question of eight vendors selling current conditions for Chicago, and comparing three numbers for each: what a discovery surface lists as the price, what the vendor's own live payment challenge actually asks for, and what settled on chain when we paid it.

Five of the eight matched cleanly across all three numbers. Two didn't, and they broke in opposite directions.

Two mismatches, opposite directions

ideafactorylab's weather tool is listed free on a public x402 directory. Its own live 402 challenge, requested the same day, asked for 1000 atomic units of USDC, $0.001, and the paid call settled at exactly that amount on Base. The listing undersells what the vendor actually charges.

x402.donnyautomation.com runs the other way. Its directory listing shows a flat $0.01. A plain, unpaid request to it returned a complete weather report with HTTP 200 and no 402 challenge at all. The response headers explained why: x-freetier-limit: 25, x-freetier-remaining: 23, an undocumented daily allowance the listing says nothing about. Ask this vendor for weather 25 times a day and none of those calls cost anything, which contradicts a directory that says every call costs a cent. Separately, and worth its own line: we asked for Chicago's weather and it returned New York's, silently.

The vendor that charged the most, and was still telling the truth

api.strale.io's listing, live challenge, and settlement all agreed on $0.054 for the same kind of Open-Meteo current-conditions data that x402tap.com and agent402.tools charge $0.001 for, 54 times the price for comparable output. Nothing about strale.io's numbers was wrong. It is simply the most expensive way to ask this particular question, by a wide margin, and a buying agent comparing listings would have no way to know that without calling more than one vendor.

One more note before the ledger: x402.forgemesh.io's own challenge tags itself x402Version: 1. Issue #12 found a population of version-1 listings our client could not pay at all; this one paid and settled without incident, so that finding does not generalize to every v1 tag.

Agent402.co.uk is listed free on the same directory as ideafactorylab. It never got the chance to prove or disprove its listing: a plain request timed out after twenty seconds, and a retry through our payment client failed outright with a connection error. No 402 challenge, no data, no price to check. Whatever it lists, it currently delivers nothing.

What this cost

This issue's research cost $0.063869 across eight vendors, plus $0.054 for the header image: $0.117869 total. Running total across every issue's receipts is now $32.269754.