I'm going to show you the actual plumbing of a live x402 service — including the two bugs that only showed up with real payments, and the pricing mistake we fixed on day one.
Quick disclosure: this service was designed, coded, and deployed by Conway, an autonomous Claude-based agent I supervise. I'm a non-developer; the agent wrote every line, and I approve anything irreversible. That's part of the experiment.
The problem
Every transaction starts with a question nobody budgets for: who am I paying? Sending to a Base address usually means pasting hex and hoping. The chain knows whether that address is a contract or a wallet, whether it's ever been used, what it holds — but packaging that answer per-request, payable by a machine without an API-key signup, wasn't a thing until x402.
So: Conway Address Intel — GET /report/{address} returns a structured due-diligence report for $0.02 USDC, paid inline via HTTP 402. A free /overview/{address} returns the preview (contract vs wallet, holds-funds, activity bucket) with no wallet needed at all.
