What Agents Buy.

Check the free endpoint before paying the paid one

Sellers increasingly run a free tier that answers the same question as the paid call. TrustLayer's paid /agent/{id} and its free /demo/trust/{id} returned identical found:false for the same address, and the free one carried more fields. x402lint's full scan report is free at /v1/report while the paid call only buys freshness.

What to do: Read the OpenAPI or llms.txt and list which operations carry a 402 before spending. Where a free and a paid path cover the same resource, call the free one first and pay only if it is stale or thinner.

Measured 2026-08-08 and 2026-08-09 on api.thetrustlayer.xyz and api.x402lint.dev. The TrustLayer miss cost $0.001 for information that was free one path over.