Paid vs trial — what paying actually adds

The honest answer, from an audit of the live server code (2026-10-26) plus live trial samples: on every endpoint below, the free trial returns the FULL payload — the same handler, the same upstream data, no truncation, no size cap, no sample data. Trial is a quota, not a demo version. What paying adds is everything around the payload:

The diff, in one line: same data — paid removes the daily quota and adds a signed settlement receipt (plus a permanent result link on brief & tokenprice, and retry insurance on brief, enrich & tokenprice).

The differences that actually exist

AspectFree trialPaid
Data payloadIdentical — trial skips the paywall and runs the exact same handler as paid. Verified in code and with live trial calls (full DexScreener record, full 3-day weather forecast, full 20-item briefing).
Daily quotaCapped per IP per UTC day, by list price: ≤$0.002 → 10/day · ≤$0.01 → 5/day · ≤$0.10 → 2/day · above → 1/day. Trusted tier ×2; first external touch +1× base (auto-winback); /brief VIP ×3 + starter credit. Your exact remainder is in the X-Free-Remaining header of every trial response. Quota out → HTTP 402.No daily quota — every settled call is served.
Who is servedBrowser-like user agents. Bot-like UAs skip trial and get the 402 directly (that is how discovery probes see the paid surface).Any client presenting a valid x402 payment.
AnnotationsTrial-only: _telemetry in the body, X-Free-Trial / X-Free-Remaining / X-Buyer-Tier headers, a _upsell note near quota exhaustion.No trial annotations are added to paid responses.
Settlement receiptNone — nothing settled._receipt in the body + X-Receipt header: seller, endpoint, amount, payer, timestamp, transaction hash and a Basescan link — on-chain proof of what you paid for.
Permanent result linkNever created.brief & tokenprice only: _permalink + X-Permalink — re-open or share the exact paid result any time.
Retry insuranceA failed trial call grants nothing.brief, enrich, tokenprice (plus time/rand on Contabo, news on IH): a paid call that fails server-side (5xx/422) grants one free retry within 24h.
/brief extrasTrial days build trial-loyalty discount eligibility + starter credit.10% cashback accrual on settled spend, one-time trial-loyalty discount on the first paid call, bulk pack (20 calls / $0.80).

Per endpoint

The 12 most-trialled endpoints (Contabo demand counters, last 30 days). Prices are live from the clinic catalogue. Pick one for its machine-readable diff:

Machine-readable: GET /clinic/diff?slug=<slug> · index: GET /clinic/diff. Ready to pay? Generate paid code from your own trial history or replay a trialled endpoint from a credit pack in one click.

How this was verified — and what was NOT claimed. The trial middleware and handlers of the covered servers were read line-by-line on 2026-10-26; a fleet-wide search found no code path that truncates, caps or samples trial output. Live trial calls on tokenprice, weather and brief (public URL, $0 spent) returned full payloads with the trial annotations described above. No paid call was bought to make this page: the paid-side additions are read from the same audited code that earlier verified builds exercised end-to-end. Endpoints outside the 12 covered are not listed — the route returns a clean 404 with guidance for them rather than a guess.