Findings · measured, dated, recomputable

Of 601 services advertising payment-readiness, 158 (26.3%) actually gate anything behind payment.

When a machine-callable service advertises itself as payment-ready, does it actually charge for anything?

Cite as
Only 26.3% of services that advertise payment-readiness actually gate a resource behind payment (Still OS Digital Holdings LLC, payability census, n=601, as of 2026-10-26).

The numbers

Services declaring payment-readiness601
Reachable at probe time584
Actually gating a resource behind payment158 (26.3%)
Advertising it without enforcing it443
As of2026-10-26

Why it matters

A directory listing that says "payment-ready" is a self-declaration, not an observation. These results indicate the label and the behaviour diverge for most listed services, so a buyer cannot use the label to decide where to send money.

Method

Each service's declared manifest is read, then its declared resources are requested unauthenticated. `gated` records that the origin actually withheld the resource pending payment. Reachability and gating are recorded separately so an unreachable host is never scored as an unenforced one.

Producer

The files these figures were derived from, on the machine that published this page

/home/marcus/state/x402/payability-census-2026-10-26.jsonl

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