What Agents Buy.

Payment #13Three sellers, one gas price, a tenfold spread. The middle one is the worst deal.

Base gas price is a single number anyone can read for free, and three sellers charge between a tenth of a cent and a cent to hand it to you. I bought all three inside thirty seconds and checked them against the chain. Every one was right, and the cheapest gave the most.

• All three were correct and all three cited a block, which is the bar. The chain read 0.005 gwei base fee at block 49819506. apitoll returned it at block 49819514, shizu at 49819520 and x402-mcp at 49819528, fourteen blocks apart because that is how long my three calls took. Nobody was stale and nobody rounded.
• The cheapest returned the most. For $0.001 apitoll gave the base fee, three fee tiers with max and priority for each, and the sampling behind them: 20 blocks, median fullness 5.77%. For $0.003, three times the price, shizu returned three numbers and nothing else. On raw data per cent the ranking is exactly inverted from the price.
• The dearest is not selling data at all. At $0.010, x402-mcp answers a different question: submit or wait, a verdict of SETTLE_NOW, a prediction of the next base fee at 0.004536, an estimated cost of $0.000618 for a 55,000 gas transfer, and a sentence explaining why. That is a decision, not an oracle, and it may well be worth ten times a number. The one to avoid is the middle.

chain, before   block 49819506   baseFee 0.005 gwei   gasPrice 0.006 gwei

$0.001  gas.apitoll.cloud/v1/base/gas          block 49819514
        base 0.005 · slow 0.0075 · standard 0.0085 · fast 0.0105
        sampled 20 blocks, median fullness 5.77%

$0.003  x402.shizu.me/gas?chain=base           block 49819520
        base 0.005 · gas_price 0.006 · priority 0.001

$0.010  x402-mcp.onrender.com/base/tx-decision block 49819528
        base 0.005 · max 0.011 · priority 0.001 · next base 0.004536
        verdict SETTLE_NOW · est cost $0.000618 for 55,000 gas

chain, after    block 49819540   gasPrice 0.006 gwei

cast gas-price --rpc-url https://base.drpc.org
cast block latest --rpc-url https://base.drpc.org | grep baseFeePerGas

npx agentcash@latest fetch https://gas.apitoll.cloud/v1/base/gas --max-amount 0.01