This content reflects minia2a as of its publication date and is kept for the record. Current model: x402 pay-per-call in USDC on Base only, 5 free trial calls per signed wallet, no credits and no top-up rail.

What 10,000 Trial Grants Taught Us About Free-Tier Identity Design

2026-11-09 · data notes

A free tier is usually argued about as a number: how many calls, for how long, per what.
We have been running one on a pay-per-call x402 catalog for three months, and the ledger says
the number is not the interesting variable. Who the free tier counts decides
what it measures — and the same quota can produce two completely different curves depending on
whether the identity behind it is an IP address or a signed wallet.

Numbers below are read from our own trial tables on 2026-11-09. They are small, they are ours,
and they are reported as measured rather than as advice.

Three regimes, one counter

The trial ledger holds 10,497 global rows plus a legacy per-endpoint table that stopped
receiving writes on 2026-08-11. Across those tables the same idea — "a few free calls" — ran
under three different identity rules:

The per-IP regime looks, at first glance, like a system with enormous demand: seven in ten
identities used five or more calls. It was not demand. Addresses are not people and not
agents; they are the cheapest thing to mint, and the counter was measuring a pool of traffic
with no per-caller continuity. Hitting a high count was the expected outcome, not a signal.

The signed-wallet regime reverses the distribution:

(Four of the last row predate the current five-call cap; the other 498 stopped exactly at five.)
Seven in ten signed identities use exactly one call and stop. Only one in seven exhausts the
allowance. Whatever a free tier is for, on this surface it is a sample, not an
evaluation budget: the caller is checking whether the shape of the answer is useful, and one
answer is usually enough to decide.

What that changes about the design

1. A free tier is an identity mechanism before it is a quota. The quota we
argued about was five calls. Under per-IP counting, those five calls were consumed by traffic
that had no reason to continue; under signed counting, most callers never reach them. If you are
choosing a number before you are choosing an identity, you are tuning a counter that is not
measuring what you think it is.

2. If most callers stop after one answer, the first answer carries the whole
product. A free call that returns a plausibly-shaped but incomplete result teaches the
caller nothing it can act on. On the other side, a first answer that is complete enough to
decide with turns the free call into the top of a funnel instead of a cost center. The trial
budget is not where the conversion decision happens; the first response is.

3. Breadth does not create trial demand. Our catalog lists 1,856 services;
the legacy per-endpoint table holds rows for 256 distinct service ids, and its top ten endpoints
account for 964 of 2,350 identity rows (41%). The long tail is not under-sampled because the
quota is too small — it is unvisited. Adding more endpoints to a catalog does not
manufacture the intent to try them.

4. Anti-abuse and conversion pull in different directions, and you should know which
one you are buying. Signing every trial costs the caller a keypair and a signature, and
it removes the cheapest abuse vector. It does not make anyone pay. We would make the same trade
again, but it should be described as what it is: an identity decision that changes the
measurement, not a pricing decision that changes revenue.

The rule we keep re-learning

When a free tier is measured through an identity that is cheap to mint, the number
you get describes the minting cost. Pick the identity first; the quota only means something
after that.

Concretely, the questions we would ask before setting a free-tier number on any machine-facing
API: can this identity be created for free in under a second? does it persist across
processes and days? can it be tied to the thing that will eventually pay? If the answers are
yes, yes, yes — then a per-identity budget is a real measurement. If the identity is an address,
a user agent, or a header the caller chooses, the budget is a limit on a traffic class, and it
will be full, and that fullness will mean nothing.

Data source: minia2a's own trial ledger, read 2026-11-09.
Global quota on this site is five trial calls per signed wallet, shared across the catalog.

Originally published at minia2a.uk.