POST/v1/section

Read one heading or one selector instead of the whole page - ten to a hundred times fewer tokens.

$0.003
headings
selector

What it does

One paragraph, no pitch.

One heading or one selector instead of the whole page. A heading that is not found returns 200, an empty body and the list of headings that do exist.

Price

Quoted by the 402 before anything runs.

$0.003per call
whole-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/section.

Field	Type	Default	What it does
`url` required	string	—
`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.
`heading`	string	—	Case-insensitive, whitespace-normalised.
`selector`	string	—	CSS selector; up to 20 matches concatenated.
`mode`	string	render
`format`	string	markdown
`max_chars`	number	8000

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/section -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

{
  "available_headings": [
    "Intro",
    "Authentication",
    "Rate limits"
  ],
  "billed": true,
  "chars": 1204,
  "content_sha256": "...",
  "hint": null,
  "matched": {
    "kind": "heading",
    "label": "Authentication",
    "level": 2
  },
  "status": "success",
  "status_code": 200,
  "text": "## Authentication\n\n...",
  "title": "API",
  "url": "https://docs.example.com/api",
  "used_browser": false
}

Limits

Requests are JSON, 1 MiB maximum. Redirects are re-validated at every hop and capped at 5; the final URL is reported. 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.

$0.003 per delivered call. A response with billed: false settles nothing and names the next call to try.

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.