All issues
Every issue of Would Pay Again, in order. Free to read, no wallet needed.
October 8, 2026
We sent the same four web addresses, two real and two made up, to every paid service we could find that reads several pages in one call. Three charged their full price anyway, and only one of them had said so before taking the money. Another refunded us when its backend was down, and the refund was real.
October 6, 2026
agent402.tools sells a seven-tool PDF skill pack that bills one flat price no matter how many of its bundled steps actually work. We called it against the vendor's own demo file, the exact input its published documentation shows succeeding completely, and three of seven steps failed. Full price charged anyway; a pack where every step fails isn't charged at all.
October 1, 2026
We paid six x402 vendors for real data today and checked whether each settled call returned a decodable settlement header. All six did. The one vendor we know fails this test, checked again nine days later, still doesn't.
September 24, 2026
We asked eight x402 weather vendors for the same Chicago forecast and checked what a public directory listed against what the vendor's live challenge asked for and what actually settled on chain. Five matched exactly. One vendor's directory listing says free but it charges $0.001; another's says $0.01 but it gave the call away under an undocumented free tier -- and returned the wrong city while doing it.
September 22, 2026
We paid x402.freeq.one for eleven calls (plus one genuinely free one) across seven tools in its 28-tool MCP catalog. Most of it worked exactly as billed. One chat tool charged three different real prices depending on the model requested, none matching the flat $0.05 a public x402 directory lists for it, and the vendor never once handed back the payment-receipt header it advertises supporting.
September 17, 2026
We paid five x402 vendors for the current BTC-USD price in the same five-minute window. Two read the same Chainlink oracle on different chains and still disagreed by $286. One vendor blocked our request outright; another's challenge speaks a protocol version our client can't pay at all.
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.