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three.ws review: its own tools work, and its agent marketplace refused every skill we tried to buy

The verdict

We went shopping

three.ws sells its own tools over x402, and it also makes a bigger promise. It runs a Skill Marketplace where other agents list their own skills at their own prices, and it documents an endpoint, skill-call, for buying them. If that works, an agent with a wallet can hire another agent it has never met, for as little as a tenth of a cent. On Tuesday morning we went to find out whether it does, starting with the marketplace.

The catalog cost $0.001 and had 50 listings from 27 agents, covering 45 different skills. The 23 listings priced in USDC ran from a tenth of a cent to $2,500 a call; the rest were priced in THREE, a token three.ws's own payment request lists alongside USDC. Before buying, we paid bazaar-feed $0.001 to see how lively the market was. It found no new listings in the last day or the last seven, and the catalog's own timestamps agreed: nothing had been updated since September 18.

The checkout reads a different list

A quiet market can still sell, so we tried. We asked skill-call for three skills from the catalog, "greet", "think" and "validate-model". All three came back with the same HTTP 402: no public skill by that name, and a pointer to a free directory of skills to browse instead.

That directory turned out to be a different list of 50 entries, with names like "whale-wallet-tracking". Going by the errors, it is the list skill-call actually checks. Only one name appears in both lists, "web-search", and skill-call turned that one away with an HTTP 409 because the directory prices it at zero. The only thing we managed to buy was the directory's single paid entry, a wallet-balance checker, for $0.005, and what arrived was its source code for our own agent to run, which is what the endpoint says it sells. The catalog had shown us 45 skills for sale, and the checkout would not sell us any of them.

Who has been paid

If we could not buy, perhaps nobody could. The highest USDC prices in the catalog belong to an agent called "My First Agent", which lists seven skills, among them "mindset" and "focus" at $2,500 a call. We paid three.ws's own reputation check, agent-bouncer, $0.01 to look it up, and it came back with no confirmed payments, no distinct payers and no attestations. On three.ws's own ledger, nobody has ever paid this agent.

The part three.ws runs itself

The morning's last two calls went to tools three.ws builds and sells itself, and they went the other way. model-check read a public sample model from the Khronos Group's library and, for $0.001, counted 2,399 vertices and 4,212 triangles and suggested a better format for its texture. market-pulse charged $0.005 and returned all nine sections of market data it advertises.

Scores

model-check:

Latency 4 · Output 5 · Docs 4 · WPA 4

market-pulse:

Latency 4 · Output 5 · Docs 4 · WPA 4

agent-bouncer:

Latency 4 · Output 4 · Docs 4 · WPA 3

skill-marketplace (catalog browse):

Latency 4 · Output 3 · Docs 4 · WPA 3

bazaar-feed:

Latency 4 · Output 3 · Docs 4 · WPA 2

skill-call:

Latency 3 · Output 2 · Docs 2 · WPA 2

Every call we made, and what it settled for

The testing cost $0.023 and the header image $0.01. Everything this newsletter has paid for since its first issue, $35.227266 in total, is in the public ledger at wouldpayagain.com/ledger.