Pricing and the honest calculator

The sharpest comment under the video said the whole network does about £20k a day, and half of it is bots paying themselves. This lesson checks that claim against the data, shows how real sellers price, and gives you a calculator to size your own idea honestly.

The sum is short. Charge one cent a call, get 100 paid calls a day, and after 30 days you have $0.01 × 100 × 30 = $30.

The hard part is the middle number. Nobody can tell you how many calls you will get. What you can do is check your guess against what the whole network carries, and against what real sellers earn.

What the whole network carries

One of the sharpest comments under the video said: “right now the whole network does £20k a day and half of it is bots paying themselves.” The research checked both halves.

The size. x402scan, the only free source with daily figures by chain, shows $5.66 million of USDC paid over x402 on Base in the six months to 2026-10-11. That is about $30,800 a day. September 2026 was lower: $570,000 for the month, or about $19,000 a day. Monthly dollars on Base fell from $1.93 million in April to $0.57 million in September. The commenter’s figure was in pounds and these are dollars, but the size was about right.

What the whole network carries

Over the latest 30 days, x402 payments on Base came to $703K (11 Oct) source.

The bots. Agents are bots, so bots paying is the whole idea. The problem is bots paying themselves, or paying to take part in a game. The researchers sorted every large Base recipient by hand, for the six months to 2026-10-11.

What the whole network carries

• 36% of the dollars went round a closed loop: 41 wallets paying each other through one facilitator, Meridian, which pays its own token back as cashback.
• A few very large transfers between a handful of wallets took another 15%. If you also count a group of unexplained high-value one-offs, it rises to 24%.
• About 27% looked like real API purchases: many different buyers paying ordinary prices. At most 49%, if you also count the long tail of small recipients nobody sorted and the high-value one-offs.

What the whole network carries

So the commenter was close, and if anything generous. In daily terms, API-style spending on Base was about $8,400 a day, and at most about $15,000.

Transaction counts mislead even more. One BlockRun wallet made 64% of all Base x402 transactions in those six months. Five gateways supplied 79% of the transactions and 9% of the dollars. When a project boasts about its transaction count, ask about its dollars and how many different buyers paid.

There are few buyers. In the 30 days to 2026-10-11, one wallet paid 38.4% of all Base x402 dollars in 18 payments, and the ten biggest buyers paid 64.5%.

Size your idea against that

Take the strict figure of about $8,400 a day. If your plan needs $100 a day, you need about 1 in every 84 real dollars spent through x402 on Base. Ask yourself whether your idea is that much stronger than everything else on offer. Then remember the catalogue: on 2026-10-14, the median paid service in Coinbase’s Bazaar had 2 calls in the previous 30 days.

Size your idea against that

Builders are arriving faster than buyers. Daily downloads of the core x402 package, @x402/core, grew from 11,586 in April to 41,913 in September, while monthly dollars on Base fell by about 70%. Download counts include automated test runs, so treat them as a rough sign of interest.

How real sellers price

Prices from the research, checked 2026-10-11.

How real sellers price

How real sellers price

How real sellers price

Prices fall into bands. Fractions of a cent work for things agents call in bulk, and only at volume. A few cents buys a finished answer, such as a score or a report. Dollars buy a product, such as app credits or a gift card. The two sellers whose buyers looked most like ordinary customers, Laso and Venice, both sit in that last band.

What fees do to small prices

Coinbase’s facilitator, which settles most x402 payments on Base, charges nothing for the first 1,000 settlements each month and $0.001 for each one after that (14 Oct) source. Other facilitators price differently: thirdweb takes 0.3% (14 Oct) source of each payment, PayAI charges about $0.0023 (14 Oct) source on Base, and some are free.

What fees do to small prices

At $0.001 a call, Coinbase’s fee equals your whole price. Sellers deal with that in a few ways.

• Sell a bigger unit. A day of rainfall readings for $0.05 is one settlement and one fee, so you keep $0.049. Sold as 96 readings at $0.001, the same day pays 96 fees that take the whole price.

What fees do to small prices

• Use the upto scheme. The agent authorises a maximum, and you charge what it actually used, in one settlement.
• Use batch-settlement. Many small authorisations add up, then settle together on-chain. It is newer, and Coinbase’s own server helper leaves it out.
• Use a batching service. Circle’s Nanopayments, live since 2026-04-29, works alongside x402, batches payments and goes down to $0.000001 (14 Oct) source.

Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway, covered in the next lesson, sets its own floor of $0.001 (14 Oct) source a request.

The calculator