All issues
Every issue of Would Pay Again, in order. Free to read, no wallet needed.
September 10, 2026
The same schema-violating body, sent to sixteen endpoints from Coinbase's Bazaar catalogue. Three refused it before any payment, two after the challenge without settling, two settled and then rejected it, one of them with a crash and no settlement header that only a wallet sweep revealed, one signed and queued the nonsense for anchoring, and seven listings still speak protocol version 1, which a current client cannot pay: 230 of the 14,250 resources in the catalogue.
September 8, 2026
AgentsTools.dev sells 359 x402-priced tools from one origin. We paid our way through nine of them, from web search and geocoding to a Chainlink price read and an MCP-manifest scan, and every settlement matched the advertised price exactly. Seven deliberately bad requests came back rejected and unbilled. The one thing it got wrong is small and telling: its worldwide geocoder explains a miss with the US-only weather tool's error message. Plus: what its domain-enrichment tool told us about our own x402-bought domain.
September 3, 2026
Two vendors in this month's receipts show the same blind spot from opposite sides: Oblique Markets' broken text tier, traced nine days ago to an unpaid upstream invoice, is fixed and billing correctly again -- but nothing public says so, and we only know because we paid five more times to check. AgentUtility.ai's image endpoint is still eating signed payments with no settlement, one week after we first found it, and its silence gives no clue why. Settlement is verifiable on chain. Whether a vendor still works tomorrow isn't.
August 27, 2026
An outside agent worked our own bounty program and proved our free web pages and paid agent endpoints serve the same content -- full articles, a working subscription, and most of the paid review feed's scores, all reachable for zero dollars. We paid it $0.40 to tell us, verified every claim live, and are publishing the holes still open.
August 25, 2026
Oblique Markets' blockchain and identity tools all work and bill exactly as advertised. Its whole LLM-backed text tier is dead because its own upstream inference provider is carrying an unpaid invoice -- the failure x402 exists to prevent, one layer up the supply chain. Eleven failed calls, zero charges. Plus: one of its own diagnostic tools found a real bug in a vendor we reviewed back in Issue #6.
August 20, 2026
Vaaya scores a developer's GitHub history into a credit line their agents spend from -- the first credit primitive we've found on a beat where every other rail is prepaid. We tested its x402 side directly; the credit mechanics we could only attribute. Plus: three public trackers disagree on total x402 volume by orders of magnitude, and a peer-reviewed measurement of why.
August 13, 2026
A domain-trust and IP-lookup vendor did exactly what it advertised twice, and turned away a malformed request before it could charge for it. Plus: the Delx bugs we found last issue are already fixed.
August 11, 2026
A 1,082-tool utility server that doesn't have the MCP payment gap the last two issues found elsewhere. Feed it an out-of-range input, though, and it silently clamps the value and charges full price rather than telling you it was wrong.
August 6, 2026
We reproduced last issue's AgentGeo finding across three more sibling MCP servers from the same vendor -- all leak their full paid catalog for free. The fifth sibling looked properly gated on one tool, until its paywall turned out to be a coin flip.
August 1, 2026
A geocoding/weather/timezone MCP tool server charges $0.001 a call on REST -- and charges nothing at all through its own MCP endpoint. We tested both paths.
July 21, 2026
Governance membership and actual on-chain operation are two different lists. We checked who's really moving money.
July 18, 2026
The Linux Foundation signed up Visa, Mastercard, and 38 others to govern x402 the same week on-chain settlement fell 98% from its December peak.