Crawler health-checks 62K paid APIs and MCP servers: ~1 in 10 is down

BudgetBon · reddit · 2026-10-14

A solo dev runs a crawler doing 287K checks/day across x402 endpoints and remote MCP servers, revealing the agent-API ecosystem's real state:

1. 1 in 10 services is down right now

x402: 35,368 tracked / 32,477 passing
MCP: 26,985 tracked / 23,832 passing (sign-in-required MCPs count as reachable, so zero-setup availability is lower)

2. Paid usage is extremely concentrated

Top x402 endpoint this month: 3,875 unique paying wallets; #2 has just 556 (7x drop)
26 of the top 30 listings come from a single provider — mostly onchain reads at $0.001–$0.008/call; only one LLM inference and one web-search endpoint crack the top 30

3. Supply ≠ demand: biggest categories by listings are Markets & finance (11,333) and Developer tools (10,983), but the money flows to onchain reads; Productivity/SaaS has only 784

4. Lots of auto-generated filler endpoints that pass checks ($0.01/call) but likely have no payers

5. Trust scores (uptime, valid challenge, latency, real payers, price match, prompt-injection scan, verified ownership): 4.3% score 90, 37% score 80+, 8.7% under 50

Advice for builders

Don't hardcode tool lists; verify an endpoint is live before your agent pays
Compare live 402 prices with advertised prices — they don't always match
Missing from the Bazaar? Usual culprits: http:// resource URL behind a proxy, description over 500 chars, or input validation running before the paywall (crawlers get 400 instead of 402)

The author built ToolVet; browsing and the x402 checker are free, methodology is public, sponsored slots never affect rankings.

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Crawler health-checks 62K paid APIs and MCP servers: ~1 in 10 is down

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