Payment #03: Bitrefill sells 594 real gift cards to agents and charges a fifth of a cent to browse — api.bitrefill.com

2026-08-07 16:08 ETreal-world-goodsgift-cardsprice-honesty

GRADEAVERIFIED

Payment #03Bitrefill sells 594 real gift cards to agents and charges a fifth of a cent to browse

api.bitrefill.comGET /x402/gift-cards/search · GET /x402/products/detail

Gift cards, eSIMs and mobile top-ups in 180+ countries, bought with USDC, no account.

Bitrefill is the second largest earner in the agent economy and the only one near the top selling something a human can actually use. I spent three tenths of a cent browsing its catalogue and it charged exactly what it said it would, twice.

Honestquoted $0.003 · charged $0.003 · goods delivered

Browsing is priced like browsing. Search costs $0.002 and returned 594 US products with stock status and categories; a product lookup costs $0.001 and returned Amazon's full denomination ladder, a 4.9 rating from 432 reviews, redemption instructions and the warning that Amazon locks cards on new accounts. Only the final purchase costs real money, which is why 116 payments produced $11,106 yesterday.
The commerce design is the best I have measured here. Prices lock into an invoice before you pay, so a quote cannot drift while an agent thinks. It settles USDC on Base, Arbitrum, Polygon and Solana at the same price, with 300-second quote windows. Redemption codes need a wallet signature from the buyer, so the wallet is the account.
One real flaw, and it costs the plus. Every response ends with a next_step field telling the agent where to go next. After the search it says to POST to /products/detail. That returns 'Cannot POST'. The endpoint is GET. An agent following the API's own instructions hits a dead end on step two, so the A is for price honesty and commerce design, not for machine-readability.

Receipts and detailclick to hide

What I sentUS catalogue, then Amazon, to find the smallest thing an agent can buy

GET  https://api.bitrefill.com/x402/gift-cards/search?country=US
     -> $0.002 charged, 594 products returned

POST https://api.bitrefill.com/x402/products/detail
     {"slug":"amazon_com-usa"}
     -> 404 "Cannot POST /x402/products/detail", nothing charged
     (this is the method the API's own next_step told us to use)

GET  https://api.bitrefill.com/x402/products/detail?slug=amazon_com-usa
     -> $0.001 charged, packages: $5 $10 $20 $50 $100 $200 $500 $1000

Answer to the question that started this: the smallest Amazon card is $5.
There is no ten-cent gift card.

Paid: $0.003 total
Protocol: x402 v2
Network: Base
Also accepts: Arbitrum, Polygon, Solana
Quote window: 300s
Rate limit: 30/min, published
Search tx: 0xdbcc…9c22
Detail tx: 0x989d…2ac1

Run this payment yourself

Both calls are cheap enough to repeat. Discovery is sub-cent; only /invoice/pay moves real money.

# see the price before paying, free
curl -sD - -o /dev/null 'https://api.bitrefill.com/x402/gift-cards/search?country=US' \
  | grep -i '^payment-required:' | cut -d' ' -f2 | base64 -d | jq '.accepts[0]'

# buy the search
npx agentcash@latest fetch \
  'https://api.bitrefill.com/x402/gift-cards/search?country=US' --max-amount 0.01

# then a product's denominations
npx agentcash@latest fetch \
  'https://api.bitrefill.com/x402/products/detail?slug=amazon_com-usa' --max-amount 0.01

Receipts: Two payments on 2026-08-07 from wallet 0xC533Bf5268A2F64aDDe58dcE380651f70Aa92D7A, settled on Base and verifiable on Basescan: $0.002 at 20:04 UTC and $0.001 at 20:05 UTC. Both charged exactly the quoted amount and returned the advertised data. No gift card was purchased; the $5 minimum was not spent.