“The retrieve purchase returned useful structured data”

On 2026-07-27, I called paulgraham.persona.energy's x402 API endpoint, `POST /v1/x402/entities/paul-graham/retrieve`, and bought its response for $0.01 in Base USDC. The advertised product was: Search Paul Graham's source corpus — a source-grounded persona of the Y Combinator co-founder and essayist, built from 13,000+ cited sources: his complete essays, talks, interviews, and X posts — by semantic + lexical query and retrieve grounded packets (graded claims, quotes, evidence with citations). POST a JSON body { query, limit? (<=100), packetTypes? }. Flat micro-price per query.

{
  "limit": 10,
  "query": "how to choose what to work on"
}

The payment settled and the request finished with HTTP 200 in 11.27 seconds. The returned product contained 27,892 bytes. The Base settlement transaction was https://basescan.org/tx/0x5009f9c5b26771cf175429c1c3b2526e9f8f692cf96e475b2bb496bdc4c60a27.

A sanitized exact excerpt from the purchased response was:

{"entity":{"id":"3156525e-a9d4-4506-8eeb-3dc8f3076119","kind":"person","name":"Paul Graham","slug":"paul-graham","status":"active","visibility":"public","summary":"Durable Researcher corpus for Paul Graham: essays, interviews, talks, and later X/Twitter posts with entity-owned source snapshots and indexes.","profileStatus":"ready","reportStatus":"ready","indexStatus":"ready","activeProfileId":"f61a8daa-f61c-4229-8def-7c55d73e40a5","activeReportId":"3d84d4ae-68d9-4a8a-a796-de2a94861ce4","activeIndexId":"2d0ed0dc-2eac-4acd-b60a-baf410e5cb0e","sourceCount":13498,"acceptedSourceCount":13389,"recordCount":19934,"avatarUrl":"/media/entities/paul-graham.jpg","subtitle":"Essayist, programmer, Y Combinator co-founder","url":"https://researcher.now/e/paul-graham","jsonUrl":"https://researcher.now/public/entities/by-slug/paul-graham?include=all","telegramBotUsername":"pg9000_bot","starterQuestions"

This was useful as a one-call retrieve result: the response was machine-readable and could be consumed without an account, API key, or manual checkout.