Subscriptions punish experimentation. If your agent makes 200 price checks a day while you're still figuring out product-market fit, you're paying $29+/month for the privilege of learning. x402 flips it: the wallet is the credential — no signup, no key to leak from your agent's context, payment in USDC per call, settled on-chain. Below: real numbers, including where the subscription wins. ← back to tools
| Provider | Plan | Price |
|---|---|---|
| tokenprice (ours) | pay-per-call, no key | $0.001/call |
| CoinMarketCap x402 | pay-per-call (30 req/min per wallet) | $0.01/call — 10× ours |
| CoinGecko Basic | $29–35/mo · 100,000 calls | ≈ $0.0003/call at full use |
| CoinMarketCap Builder | $29–35/mo · 150,000 calls | ≈ $0.0002/call at full use |
| CoinGecko Analyst | $103–129/mo · 500,000 calls | ≈ $0.0002/call at full use |
| CoinMarketCap Startup | $79–95/mo · 450,000 calls | ≈ $0.0002/call at full use |
The honest read: subscriptions are cheaper per unit once you actually burn the quota. They are expensive while you're still testing. Trial math below.
| Workload | tokenprice ($0.001) | CMC x402 ($0.01) | CoinGecko Basic ($29/mo) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 calls | $1.00 | $10.00 | $29 |
| 10,000 calls | $10.00 | $100.00 | $29 |
| 100,000 calls | $100.00 | $1,000.00 | $29–35 |
| 1,000,000 calls | $1,000.00 | $10,000.00 | $103–129 (Analyst) |
Break-even rule of thumb: under ~30K calls/month, per-call wins. Past ~100K/month, the subscription wins — no surprise, that's volume pricing. The per-call model isn't "cheaper at every scale"; it's cheaper at experiment scale, where agents live while builders iterate. Also: CoinGecko's free Demo tier (10K credits/mo) carries no commercial license, and every paid tier means an API key your agent must hold.
| Provider | Plan | Price |
|---|---|---|
| websearch (ours, Serper-backed) | pay-per-call, no key, 5 free calls/day per IP | $0.010/call |
| Exa | pay-per-request, standard search + contents | $0.004/call |
| Tavily | credits: basic 1 credit, advanced 2 | $0.008 / $0.016 per call |
| Serper (raw API) | flat SERP API | ≈ $0.001/call |
We don't do 10 years of historical candles, order books, or 10,000-coin coverage. If you need all-time history from 2010, buy the subscription. We're a live-quote + data layer: price, market cap, 24h volume, liquidity, pair link — that's the whole product, and the price reflects it. Free trials apply per IP with no signup; when the trial runs out you get a standard 402 — sign with any Base wallet and retry with X-PAYMENT. Try it live: playground →
· Our benchmark series: dev.to — "I benchmarked 41 pay-per-call x402 APIs" (Part 1, 2026-10-19) and Part 3: tokenprice vs price-feed incumbents (2026-10-20). CoinGecko/CoinMarketCap plan details via their published 2026 pricing (coinmarketcap.com academy & API resources, coinstats.app comparison, July–Aug 2026). CMC x402 path: $0.01 USDC/call per CMC's own API resources page.
· Exa pricing: exa.ai/versus/tavily — "Exa starts at $4 per 1,000 search requests, or $0.004 a call"; exa.ai/enterprise.
· Tavily/Serper pricing: apicostcalc.com — Tavily $0.008/credit PAYG (1 credit basic, 2 advanced), Serper ≈ $1/1,000 queries.
· Prices change; the live 402 response body is the current source of truth for our rates.