The Going Rate for an AI Agent's API Call Is Two Cents — a 78,267-Endpoint x402 Pricing Report

Two cents. That is the going rate for an AI agent's API call in July 2026: the median x402 endpoint with a visible price charges $0.02, the middle 80% of the market runs from half a cent to a nickel, and 66% of all priced routes sit at exactly $0.02 — a number that turns out to be less a market consensus than one provider's very large catalog, which is the first lesson in reading this market honestly.

Those numbers come from the public dataset behind TOLL·402, a directory that indexes 78,267 x402 resources across roughly 2,400 provider groups and probes whether each curated route currently returns a valid 402 Payment Required quote. (Disclosure: TOLL·402 is our project; the dataset is public, so every number below can be recomputed by anyone with a Python interpreter.) We built and monetized an x402 MCP server ourselves earlier this month; this report is the other side of that story — not how to charge agents, but what everyone else is charging them.

Headline findings from the July 10, 2026 snapshot:

• $0.02 is the median per-call price across 19,338 priced routes; the 10th–90th percentile band is $0.005–$0.05.
• Only 24.7% of indexed resources publish a visible price at all. The rest expect the agent to ask.
• Only 21% of routes proved payable when probed — 16,535 of 78,267 returned a valid live 402 quote.
• It's a read economy: 94% of priced routes are GET requests.
• It's a Base + USDC monoculture: 94.2% of routes settle on Base, and virtually every asset field resolves to USDC.

How much does an x402 API call cost?

The route-level distribution is tight at the middle and wild at the tail. Across the 19,338 resources with a visible USD price:

Percentile	Price per call
10th	$0.005
25th	$0.02
Median	$0.02
75th	$0.02
90th	$0.05
99th	$5.00

78.6% of priced routes fall between one cent and ten cents. The extremes are thin: 14 routes price below a tenth of a cent, while 138 routes ask $10 or more — and the expensive tail mostly isn't data at all (more on that below).

The suspicious part is that 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile all landing on $0.02 — 12,825 routes, 66% of everything priced, at exactly two cents. That is not twelve thousand independent pricing decisions. One provider, lowpaymentfee, lists 10,662 of those routes from a single catalog. This is the unit-of-analysis trap in any endpoint-level census: a handful of mega-catalogs can masquerade as market consensus.

So we recomputed at the provider level, treating each of the 770 providers with visible pricing as one data point (its own median price). The provider view spreads out considerably:

Percentile	Typical provider price
10th	$0.001
25th	$0.005
Median	$0.02
75th	$0.125
90th	$1.00

The median holds at $0.02 either way — that number is robust (dropping lowpaymentfee entirely doesn't move the route-level percentiles). But the provider view reveals what the route view hides: a quarter of providers price above 12 cents, and one in ten prices at a dollar or more per call. The market has a cheap, high-volume commodity floor and a genuinely premium tier, and averaging across them tells you nothing.

How many x402 endpoints actually take payment?

This is the number that should temper every "78,000 agent-payable APIs" headline, including ours: when probed, only 16,535 routes — 21% of the index — returned a valid, parseable 402 quote. 51,293 routes answered with something other than a 402. Another 358 returned a 402 that failed validation, and 176 returned quotes that couldn't be parsed at all.

The registry's health grades tell the same story from a different angle: 25% of resources are graded healthy, 53% degraded, and 15% outright down. And the provider-level cut is bleakest — of 3,285 named providers in the dataset, only 952 (29%) have even one route that produced a valid live quote.

None of this is unusual for a protocol ecosystem eight months into its hype cycle; it is the reason we keep hammering on verification. A price you can't actually be quoted is not a price. Every pricing statistic in the previous section, re-run only on probe-confirmed routes (4,359 of them carry visible prices), gives: median $0.02, 75th percentile $0.025, 90th percentile $0.10. The payable market is slightly more expensive at the top than the listed market — dead endpoints skew cheap.

What are agents actually buying?

Reads. 91.6% of all indexed routes are GET requests, and among priced routes GET's share rises to 94%. POST accounts for nearly all the rest (6,560 routes overall); DELETE, PUT, and PATCH together are a rounding error at 35 routes. The x402 economy in 2026 is overwhelmingly agents reading — search results, market data, entity lookups, public records — not agents acting.

The category labels are still primitive (86% of resources carry no useful tag), but among the tagged: search tools, agent-to-agent services, web data, unit conversion, crypto/DeFi data, public records, and US government data lead. That list looks like the shopping basket of a research agent, which matches who is actually holding funded wallets right now.

The expensive tail confirms the read-economy thesis by exception. The routes charging $10+ are mostly not expensive data — they're x402 used as a checkout rail: $100,000 "top up your account balance" routes from compute providers, sponsorship tiers from $1,000 to $50,000, and one-off invoice-style payment links. That's a second, quieter use of the protocol: not machine-to-machine data purchase but plain payments infrastructure that happens to speak HTTP.

Which networks and currencies dominate x402?

Base, and it isn't close. Of the 77,999 routes with network data, 94.2% accept payment on Base. Solana is a clear but distant second at 15.7% (routes can accept multiple networks), then Polygon (2.3%), Arbitrum (2.1%), and Stellar (1.6%). The long tail is genuinely long — Noble (Cosmos), World Chain, even 71 routes accepting Bitcoin Lightning — and genuinely thin.

The asset side barely qualifies as a distribution: virtually every payment option in the dataset resolves to USDC, whether written as "USD Coin," the ticker, or one of its per-chain contract addresses (Base's 0x8335…, Solana's EPjF…, Polygon's, Arbitrum's, Stellar's). x402 in practice is a USDC-on-Base protocol with a Solana side door. If you're deciding which network to support first, the data has already decided for you.

What should you charge for your x402 endpoint?

Three pricing rules fall straight out of the data:

1. $0.02 is the anchor, whether you like it or not. It's the median of the listed market, the median of the probe-verified market, and the median provider's typical price. An agent (or the human configuring its spending ceiling) will see two cents everywhere; that's the reference point your price gets judged against.

2. The defensible band for a simple data read is $0.005–$0.05. That's the 10th–90th percentile of listed routes and comfortably inside the verified market. When we priced our own MCP server's tools at $0.005–$0.01, we accidentally landed at the market's 10th–25th percentile — fine for a niche dataset building traction, and now we know it.

3. Above $0.10 you need a story; above $1 you need a moat. Only 10% of verified routes price above a dime, but a quarter of providers typically charge above $0.125 — premium pricing is a provider strategy, not a per-route accident. The providers pulling it off sell things a $0.02 commodity route can't substitute: multi-step investigations, compliance checks, model inference. If your endpoint is one fetch away from a free API, the market has already priced you at two cents.

And one distribution rule: a price nobody can be quoted doesn't exist. With 79% of indexed routes failing a live-quote probe, simply being verifiably payable puts you in the top fifth of the market. Keep your 402 response valid, keep your origin reachable, and get listed where verification happens — that's the discovery problem, and it's worth more than any pricing cleverness.

Method, data, and caveats

Every statistic above was computed from the public TOLL·402 dataset — x402-resources-latest.ndjson.gz, snapshot dated July 10, 2026: 78,267 rows, one per resource (HTTP method + URL), each carrying provider, pricing, network, asset, registry-health, and probe-verification fields. How the index is assembled from the Coinbase CDP Bazaar and 402 Index crawls — normalization, deduplication, and what counts as a valid quote — is documented in TOLL·402's crawl methodology, and its own pricing field report is the companion read from the index's side.

Caveats worth carrying with you:

• Visible prices only. 75.3% of resources publish no price; they may quote one dynamically to a live 402 request. Our percentiles describe the advertised market, not the whole market.
• Catalog concentration. Ten providers account for 73.8% of all resources; orbisapi alone lists 36,886 (though only 204 of them priced). Route-level and provider-level views genuinely differ — we report both, and you should distrust any x402 statistic that doesn't say which it's using.
• Prices move. This is a one-day snapshot of an eight-month-old market. Treat the percentiles as a July 2026 baseline, not a law.

The agent economy's price list is public now. Two cents is the number to beat.