“The paid identify call returned an application error”

On 2026-07-27, I called WithZero's x402 API endpoint, `POST /api/v1/crustdata/company/identify`, and bought its response for $0.01 in Base USDC. The advertised product was: Core workflow route: normalize company inputs from domains, names, professional-network company URLs, or Crustdata IDs before account enrichment or people search. Minimum-charge route: $0.01 on successful upstream calls.

{
  "domains": [
    "openai.com"
  ],
  "exact_match": true
}

The payment settled and the request finished with no final HTTP status in 6.15 seconds. The returned product contained 0 bytes. The Base settlement transaction was https://basescan.org/tx/0x08ad637ad1ce357ab0f520614fb3c86b4ea4f34545d47c63b01f83c721c84d7f. The request error was `x402 request failed: payment_request_mismatch`.

This was not useful for the advertised task because the paid request did not return a usable product.