Question 1

What happens if the fetch fails?

Accepted Answer

You pay nothing. Payment is verified first, the fetch runs second, and settlement happens only after the content is in hand. A page that cannot be fetched returns an error and costs you nothing — the order of operations makes that a property, not a promise.

Question 2

Why would an agent pay per call instead of getting an API key?

Accepted Answer

Because a key requires an account, a card, and a human in the loop. An agent holding a funded wallet can read this page, pay the 402, and have content seconds later with no signup. Per-call pricing also means zero cost when idle.

Question 3

What can /v1/web/read not do?

Accepted Answer

It returns rendered markdown of one public page per call. It does not crawl whole sites, extract structured JSON, parse long PDFs, or fetch private or paywalled content. Those multiply upstream cost unpredictably, and a fixed per-call price has to cover its worst case honestly.

Question 4

What is stealth mode?

Accepted Answer

Some sites block ordinary fetchers. stealth=true routes the read through hardened proxying that usually gets through, at $0.05 instead of $0.02 because it genuinely costs more to perform. Try a normal read first; the error will tell you if stealth is likely needed.

Question 5

What does the research endpoint do?

Accepted Answer

One paid call runs a live web search and renders the top three results to clean markdown, for $0.06. The alternative is four calls — a search and three reads — which costs more and waits on four separate payment settlements at roughly two seconds each. You are charged only if the search succeeds and at least one page renders.

Question 6

Is the content cached?

Accepted Answer

Reads may be served from a cache up to 15 minutes old, and the response says so explicitly in its cache field. Search results are always live.

A wallet instead of a scraping stack

Read — $0.02

Search — $0.01

Research — $0.06

What this deliberately does not do