POST/v1/probe

Metadata before spending: status, type, title, size, language, whether a bot wall is waiting. No page body.

free
no body
30/min

What it does

One paragraph, no pitch.

Metadata before spending: status, content type, size, title, language and whether a bot wall is waiting. No page body, no browser, always free.

Price

Quoted by the 402 before anything runs.

freeper call
10 s default, 60 s maximumwhole-call budget
billedonly when content is delivered
no keythe payment is the credential

x402 settlement is live on eip155:8453: sign a USDC transfer and retry with PAYMENT-SIGNATURE.

When to call it

Cheapest endpoint that answers the question, first.

Call it when the sentence above is the whole job. Its neighbours solve the same URL with a different trade-off — a browser instead of plain HTTP, a site instead of one page, one section instead of a document. /choose walks the decision in thirteen routes, cheapest first, browser last.

Not sure the page is worth paying for at all? /v1/probe is free and returns the status, content type, size, title, language and whether a bot wall is waiting — no body.

Request fields

JSON body. Send this to https://readfetch.com/v1/probe.

Field	Type	Default	What it does
`url` required	string	—	Public http(s) URL to inspect.
`egress`	string	—	Egress pool to leave through: `direct` (the default route, no proxy) or any pool the operator configured, e.g. `residential` (the home exit) or `local`. Omit to route by host rules.
`accept_language`	string	—	Accept-Language header, e.g. 'de-DE,de;q=0.9'. Defaults to en-US.
`timeout_s`	number	10	Total budget for the whole call in seconds.

Make the call

Unpaid, this answers 402 with the quote. Sign accepts[0] and resend with PAYMENT-SIGNATURE.

curl

curl -s https://readfetch.com/v1/probe -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"url":"https://example.com"}'

json body

{
  "url": "https://example.com"
}

Response

Fields shown are the ones a caller branches on.

200 ok

{
  "billed": false,
  "bytes": 41233,
  "challenge": false,
  "content_sha256": "9f2c1b0d4f5a6e7c8b9d0a1f2e3d4c5b6a7f8e9d0c1b2a3f4e5d6c7b8a9f0e1d",
  "content_type": "text/html; charset=utf-8",
  "language": "en",
  "redirected": true,
  "requested_url": "https://example.com",
  "status": "success",
  "status_code": 200,
  "title": "Example Domain",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/"
}

Limits

Requests are JSON, 1 MiB maximum. Redirects are re-validated at every hop and capped at 5; the final URL is reported. 10 s default, 60 s maximum is the whole-call budget — DNS, connect, redirects, retries and any render share it, and no step starts a fresh clock.

Failures come back as {"error": "…", "hint": "…"} with a status to branch on: 402 for the quote, 429 with Retry-After, 502 and 504 for the upstream. /docs lists the shapes.

Billing

Settled after the work, only when something was delivered.

Free: no payment header, nothing settles, even when the page is delivered.

billed: false means nothing settled: a bot wall, an empty extraction, an unsupported type or a transport failure. The hint on that response names the next call to try.

Every settlement carries a signed RECEIPT bound to the transaction. If a paid call delivered nothing, a claim issues a single-use credit for it — the rail cannot refund.