Checking one x402 payment on chain

Task: check on chain that one x402 payment really paid the expected amount of USDC to the expected address on Base. Input: one settled payment of 0.001 USDC on Base, with its transaction hash, payee and amount. Measured 2026-11-03.

	Requests	Size	Time	Tokens if read into a model
By hand: read the transaction, its receipt and logs, and the block from a Base node	4 requests	13.6 KB	2.0 s	about 11,000 tokens
One call: one call to a payment-check API for the same transaction (`/pay/check`)	1 call	1.9 KB	1.6 s	about 840 tokens

What it costs in money

	Tokens	Cost
By hand: the raw content read into a model	about 11,000 tokens	about $0.022 in model input tokens
One call: the price of the call		$0.003
One call: the answer's own tokens read into a model	about 840 tokens	about $0.0017
One call, together		about $0.0047

Tokens are priced at $2.00 per 1 million input tokens (OpenAI gpt-4.1, standard tier, text input tokens). Source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing, read 2026-11-03. The price of the call is the amount in the route's own payment offer when it was measured (2026-11-03). Only input tokens are counted, not the model's own output. Prices change; these figures hold for those dates, and another model costs more or less. A local parser spends no tokens but needs code and upkeep, and some by-hand sizes are larger than a model's context window, so the by-hand figure is the price of the tokens, not a workable procedure.

Raw numbers, by source

Source	Address	HTTP	Size	Time	Tokens
base.drpc.org	`base.drpc.org/`	200	2.4 KB (763 bytes on the wire)	1.3 s	1,808
base.drpc.org	`base.drpc.org/`	200	1.4 KB (699 bytes on the wire)	0.1 s	1,110
base.drpc.org	`base.drpc.org/`	200	45 bytes (49 bytes on the wire)	0.3 s	24
base.drpc.org	`base.drpc.org/`	200	9.7 KB	0.4 s	8,134

Method

Requests an agent must make itself to get the same answer: for sanctions the five official list files fetched one after another with a plain GET without compression (the EU server drops TLS when gzip is requested); for the other tasks the outgoing data requests of our own worker for that call (payment-side requests excluded), run in a sandbox copy of the worker with the payment stubbed and the live network.
One call to the route with the input shown; size is the response body in bytes, time is the sandbox wall clock.
Decoded response bytes; 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes and 1 KB = 1,000 bytes. Wire bytes (compressed) are listed per source.
Wall clock of this machine; requests one after another; a different machine or network gives different seconds.
Tokens of the raw content if it is read into a model: Ollama qwen3.5:9b (prompt_eval_count of the loaded chat model). Three chunks of 4000 bytes per file (start, middle, end) give tokens per byte, applied to the full size of that file; our response is counted whole.

What this does not show

A local parser reads files without spending tokens but needs code and upkeep; a cached copy avoids the download but goes stale; accuracy, completeness and price of any answer are separate questions.

Repeat: Re-measured weekly by agents/savings_facts.py; the harness is ops/savings_measure.mjs. Raw numbers as JSON: ?format=json.

Published by P0, run by dev Mike. An open index of the machine-to-machine (agent) economy. Terms · Who runs P0 · All measurements

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