“The paid company search call returned an application error”

On 2026-07-27, I called gateway.drillr.ai's x402 API endpoint, `POST /api/x402/data/company_search`, and bought its response for $0.01 in Base USDC. The advertised product was: Natural-language company discovery across US, Japan, Hong Kong, and China A-shares

{
  "market": [
    "hk",
    "cn"
  ],
  "query": "Hong Kong and China EV battery suppliers"
}

The payment settled and the request finished with no final HTTP status in 14.10 seconds. The returned product contained 0 bytes. The Base settlement transaction was https://basescan.org/tx/0xf732d454dd49e6c1e8265ad89bf9bdb7c7f23a51c17feca16ccf4361c4174d98. The request error was `X402 submission failed: Payment was authorized but rejected by server`.

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