For the last several months I've run NetIntel, a platform of pay-per-call APIs settled in USDC over x402 — no signup, no API keys, no accounts. An agent hits an endpoint, gets a 402 Payment Required, pays a fraction of a cent, and gets structured data back. That's the whole loop.

I built a lot of endpoints. Network intelligence, domain forensics, text transforms, a long menu of things I was convinced agents would want.

Then I looked at what they actually paid for. The answer wasn't what I expected, and it changed how I build. Here's the data, with the caveats up front so nobody has to dig for them.

The setup

Roughly 2,000 paid calls (per x402scan, the public x402 analytics tracker) across 74 live endpoints, real USDC on Base, over a period of months. This is one platform's data in a young ecosystem — see the caveats at the bottom before you extrapolate. But the shape of it was clear enough that I stopped treating it as noise.