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Two of eight services that list or check paid x402 endpoints worked the way their own listings said when we tried them

Before an agent can pay for anything, it has to find it, and most x402 services get found through catalogs and registries that say what is for sale and at what price. The last two issues were about what vendors charge when a job goes wrong. This week we went one step earlier and tested the listings themselves.

On Thursday morning we took eight services that list or check other paid endpoints, found the way an agent would find them, and asked each one for what its own listing promised.

Shelves with nothing on them

Agoragentic, at agoragentic.com, lists two catalogs of things an agent can buy anonymously. The first answered with an HTTP 200 and an empty list, and its own response said why: the platform's custody was frozen, so nothing was for sale. The second, on the same domain, refused outright with an HTTP 503 and a different reason, saying that route was not authorized. The same marketplace was broken two different ways at once.

AgentServices (agentservices.to) publishes a manifest of its prices and payment options. It returned an HTTP 503 with the text "DEPLOYMENT_PAUSED", which reads to us like the hosting platform's notice that the project behind it has been switched off. We asked twice to rule out a cached answer and got the same thing. agent402.co.uk, which has not answered us since September 24, did not answer a third time.

Suede AI, at agents.suedeai.ai, was the most candid. Its discovery document lists five agents and marks which ones can actually be paid right now, and only one, a purchase-order checker called PO Match Gate, is marked as payable. So we sent it a real purchase order and invoice. It replied "Sign in to use Agent Studio" with an HTTP 401 and never asked for payment. The one agent its own catalog says is for sale would not sell to an agent that showed up with money.

What we got when we paid

Conclave, which runs on pythonanywhere.com, sells a check that is supposed to take one listing and tell you whether the live price and network still match what the catalog says. We asked it about the empty catalog above and paid $0.009. What came back was a summary of a survey Conclave had run on its own two days earlier. It did not report on the listing we asked about. We then found a second listing for what looked like the same service under a different web address and paid that one $0.009 too, to see whether it was an independent check. The answer was identical down to the timestamp, so the second payment bought the same stored report.

That report is Conclave's, and we did not verify it, but it bears on this week's question. Conclave says it sampled 200 endpoints from a catalog of more than 20,000 entries. By its count, 33 did not answer at all, and 64 of the rest answered with a price, network or tag that did not match their own listing. Conclave calls it "a sample, not a census."

Trust Agent (trust-agent.io) sells filtered views of ERC-8004, the public registry where agents on Base announce themselves. Its own listing said to send a POST request. That returned an HTTP 405 telling us to use GET instead, at no charge. The GET cost $0.010001, and the answer came flagged by Trust Agent itself as possibly stale, with a note that it "may omit agents that are live and include agents that are no longer reachable."

We had asked for 100 agents that declare a working service and say they accept x402. When we went through the 100 rows ourselves, 45 pointed at the same website, supermission.fun, and paid out to the same wallet. Names like "test-agent-1770229301", "FrontendPro" and "DataWizard" ran through the list, and 32 of the 100 had "test" in their name. The 100 rows named only 31 payout wallets between them, and three named none.

Trust Agent's free summary gives the wider picture. By Trust Agent's count there are 140,640 agents registered on Base, and it has checked 89,326 of them. Of those, Trust Agent counts 30,726 that point at a working description of a real service and 2,478 that say they take x402 payments, under 2% of everything registered.

Two catalogs were fine. Agent Souk's at agentsouk.dev and Xona Agent's at xona-agent.com both came back free and matched their listings, and we did not buy anything from either. So of the eight services we tried, two did what their listing said, and the registry service sold us a page of agents in which nearly half were one website.

What each call returned, and what it cost

The reporting cost $0.028001 and the header image $0.01. Everything this newsletter has paid for since its first issue, $34.994266 in total, is in the public ledger at wouldpayagain.com/ledger.