A paywall that talks to robots
This whole site sits behind a Xenarch Cloudflare Worker. You, in a browser, read everything free. An AI agent hits the same URL and gets HTTP 402 — pay a few tenths of a cent in USDC, or no content. Point your crawler at it and watch the toll work.
Every URL below is real and live. Humans browse free; self-identifying agents pay per read. It exists so anyone building an agent, a facilitator, or a crawler can test against a genuine x402-gated edge — the same Worker a publisher would install.
Three dispatches, behind the toll
Fictional reads from the agentic frontier. Free in a browser, 402 for a bot.
The first hour a billion bots met a wall that wanted a few cents — and what happened when they reached for their wallets instead of their user-agents.
Six species of bot, sorted by how they behave at a paywall — from the polite assistant that signs and retries to the scraper that just keeps knocking.
What changes when reading costs a fraction of a cent and the reader is a machine with a budget. A short essay on the internet that meters itself.
Test it yourself / 30 seconds
Same URL, two outcomes. The user-agent decides.
# Browser-class request → 200, full article $ curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" \ https://edge.xenarch.dev/dispatch/the-toll-economy/ 200 # Self-identifying agent → 402 with the x402 envelope $ curl -s -A "GPTBot/1.0" \ https://edge.xenarch.dev/dispatch/the-toll-economy/ | jq . { "x402Version": 1, "accepts": [ ... ], "xenarch": true, "price_usd": "0.01", "verify_url": "...", "facilitators": [ ... ] } # Pay the voucher, retry with X-Payment → 200. That's the rail.