Four tiers, 82 endpoints, zero surprises. Reads are rounding-error cheap. Standard writes are a nickel. Heavy writes are a dime. The few high-friction protective writes are a quarter — and that is on purpose.
Pure infrastructure. Things like the facilitator (verify/settle), CDP wallet linkage, email-binding, and the health beacon. Charging for these would make the protocol harder to onboard onto, so we eat the cost.
On-chain reads with multi-chain fallback, normalized JSON, cached for sub-second latency. Priced low enough that an agent can poll dozens of trust lanes per workflow without thinking about cost.
Most tx-prepare endpoints. The fee covers building, simulating, and gas-estimating the unsigned transaction; the actual chain gas is paid by the caller when they broadcast. Five cents is a deliberate ceiling — cheap enough an agent can pay it for every routine on-chain action.
Writes that touch the high-value contracts — bond creation, agent identity registration, credential issuance, cross-chain bridging, batch onboarding. More expensive to simulate (deeper call trees, more state) and more consequential when they succeed. Still well under the cost of one Layer 2 swap.
Friction by design. These are the actions you do not want spammed: slashing reputation, disputing a task, challenging bond metrics. The higher fee is a Sybil filter, not a revenue play — it keeps the dispute layer signal-rich. If your challenge is upheld on-chain, you also earn a share of slashed stake, so the math still works for legitimate use.
If a price would make an agent flinch before calling, it is wrong. Every write is priced under the cost of a single L2 swap; every read is priced under the cost of a single token transfer.
Vaultfire is tx-prepare: we build the calldata, you sign and broadcast. The x402 fee covers preparation, simulation, schema, and the live 402 challenge. On-chain gas is paid by your wallet when you broadcast, separately.
Every price you see here is the same price on /api/x402/discovery, in the /.well-known/x402.json manifest, in each route’s live 402 challenge, and in our health beacon. If they ever drift, that is a bug — please open an issue.
The price an agent pays is the same price a Fortune 500 pays is the same price a grant reviewer pays when poking around. There is no priced-up enterprise tier sitting behind a sales call.
The discovery endpoint returns every path, method, price, and description as JSON. Diff it whenever you want — this page and the discovery endpoint share a single source of truth.
All prices are in USDC on Base. Tx-prepare endpoints return an unsigned transaction; the caller signs locally and broadcasts. On-chain gas is paid by the caller's wallet, separately from the x402 fee. No private keys ever touch our servers. If you spot a price that disagrees with the live 402 challenge of any endpoint, please open an issue — we treat that as a bug.