{
 "slug": "advertised-payment-readiness",
 "url": "https://stillosdigitalholdings.com/findings/advertised-payment-readiness",
 "question": "When a machine-callable service advertises itself as payment-ready, does it actually charge for anything?",
 "headline": "Of 601 services advertising payment-readiness, 158 (26.3%) actually gate anything behind payment.",
 "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).",
 "numbers": {
  "Services declaring payment-readiness": "601",
  "Reachable at probe time": "584",
  "Actually gating a resource behind payment": "158 (26.3%)",
  "Advertising it without enforcing it": "443",
  "As of": "2026-10-26"
 },
 "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.",
 "producers": [
  "/home/marcus/state/x402/payability-census-2026-10-26.jsonl"
 ]
}