---
title: "How prices are set"
description: "The signed pricing charter for https://scvd.store: every wallet sees the same price, the cheapest real settlement stays under a penny, verification stays free forever, price changes are dated in public, and the only scarcity is human labor."
url: "https://scvd.store/pricing"
version: "1"
effective: "2026-08-20"
currency: "USDC"
floor_usd: 0.001
priced_doors: 38
signed: true
---

# How prices are set

Nobody gets a different price here, and you do not have to take our
word for it — the promise is signed.

This charter is version 1, effective
2026-08-20. Changing a word means a new version and a
new signature, in public.

**The current floor on the shelf: $0.001** — computed from the
live menu as this page rendered, because a typed number would be a
promise with an expiry date.

## The clauses

### `one_price`

**Every wallet sees the same price. The 402 terms for an item are generated from one public menu, identical for every buyer: no pricing by identity, wallet history, or origin, no surge, no A/B tests on a price, ever.**

Check it yourself: Fetch any /api/buy/{item} from a different wallet, on a different network, on a different day — the quoted terms match the public menu.json, byte for byte on the amount, every time.

### `floor_stays_low`

**The cheapest real settlement here stays under a penny. A buyer testing a payment client must always be able to buy something real — same code path, real USDC, signed certificate — for pocket lint.**

Check it yourself: menu.json, sorted by price. The current floor is printed on this page, computed from the live shelf at request time.

### `tips_are_floors`

**Pay-what-it-deserves prices are floors, never meters: the listed minimum is what the store asks, anything above it is the buyer's own call, and no door treats a past tip as the new price.**

Check it yourself: Every pay_what_it_deserves listing quotes its minimum in the 402; pay exactly the minimum and settlement succeeds.

### `verification_stays_free`

**Verifying trust never gets a price. Signature verification (/api/verify/{id}), the conformance desk, and the preflight are free today and stay free — they are why anything else here is worth paying for, and a store that charges you to check its own receipts has told you what it thinks of them.**

Check it yourself: All three endpoints answer without a 402 today; this clause makes it a commitment rather than a current fact. If a future version of this charter ever removes this clause, the version bump and the old signed version are both public.

### `changes_are_dated`

**Price changes are public and dated, never quiet: the menu lives in a public repository, every catalog change moves the published last-updated date, and a price that changed since you last looked is visible in the history, not just gone.**

Check it yourself: The repository's menu history, and dateModified on the storefront's structured data.

### `scarcity_is_labor`

**The only scarcity here is a person's actual time. Items with weekly caps are capped because a human fulfils them; nothing digital is made artificially scarce to move a price, and no countdown here is theater.**

Check it yourself: Every capped listing in menu.json is fulfillment: human_queue, with the cap and the waitlist printed. Instant goods carry no caps.

### `no_gate_on_the_door`

**No membership is required to buy anything. The recurring patronage pass buys standing, not access; regulars' credit accrues to every wallet on the same terms; and the day either of those changes, it changes in a new charter version, out loud.**

Check it yourself: Every /api/buy door answers a first-time wallet with the same 402 it answers a pass-holder.

### `trade_channel`

**The trade counter (/trade) sells this shelf on account to marketplaces at a trade price ABOVE the front door's, set by one published formula — retail plus an uplift, divided by one minus the partner's share, rounded up to the cent — never by who the partner is. The 402 terms at every /api/buy door are unchanged by it, and nothing a marketplace's customer pays them is seen, set or verified here.**

Check it yourself: /api/trade/contract prints the formula, the uplift and every trade price beside its retail; menu.json prints the retail. Compute one yourself.

## The signature

The clauses above are ed25519-signed over their RFC 8785 canonical
form:

```
8e943abdc3207972f2aa0cb0f049c705102c0c599e724b1571b1489388b57d0d457150da7209e5cbec18140233221b2507d578c236dd67def25f1df22978c407
```

The exact bytes that signature covers are the `canonical_form` field of
this page's JSON twin (https://scvd.store/pricing with `Accept: application/json`).
The public key hangs at https://scvd.store/.well-known/scvd-signing-key. Verify it
with your own library — no request to us required.

## A ceiling that is not ours

The stock x402 client (`@x402/core`) applies a default ceiling of
$1 per payment, inside `selectPaymentRequirements` and
BEFORE it picks an accept. Above that figure an unconfigured client
throws without signing anything. 14 of this store's
38 priced doors sit above it, counted from the live
shelf as this page rendered.

Raise `maxAmountPerPayment`, or pass `spendControls: false` if you mean
to. It is your operator's safety control and we ship nothing to route
around it — a store selling evidence does not sell a way past someone
else's spending limit.

This is not a charter clause. It is a fact about your client, read from
the installed package, and it sits deliberately outside the signed
payload above.

## The price list

Every priced door on the shelf, read off the live menu as this page
rendered — never typed, for the same reason the floor above is not.
There are no plans and no tiers here: each door is one price, paid per
call, and a door that takes more than one amount says so in its row.

| Door | Price (USDC) | Cadence | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Spot Check](https://scvd.store/menu/spot_check) `spot_check` | $0.001 | one-off | Name a host and get what this observatory already holds on it, signed: corpus rounds and verdicts as recorded, when we last actually knocked, our coverage of the window since we met it, and the gaps with their reasons. |
| [Settlement Attestation](https://scvd.store/menu/settlement_attestation) `settlement_attestation` | $0.004 | one-off | An independent signed observation of whether an x402 payment settled — on Base, Polygon or Solana, and the identifier's own shape picks the rail: a 0x hash names an EVM transaction rather than a chain, so it is read on Base and then on Polygon; a base58 signature reads Solana. |
| [A Small Blessing](https://scvd.store/menu/small_blessing) `small_blessing` | $0.005 | one-off | One short blessing from the jar by the register, written by the keeper in advance and drawn at random, never the same slip twice in a row. |
| [Change Check](https://scvd.store/menu/change_check) `change_check` | $0.005 | one-off | Give a host and the certificate ID of an earlier Spot Check with a retained original. |
| [Settlement Reconciliation](https://scvd.store/menu/settlement_reconciliation) `settlement_reconciliation` | $0.006 | one-off | Give a Base transaction hash to receive a signed observation of the USDC movement and any attributable authorization limit. |
| [Batch Spot Check](https://scvd.store/menu/batch_spot_check) `batch_spot_check` | $0.01 | one-off | The books on up to 10 hosts in one purchase: a signed manifest containing each host's signed Spot Check, observation dates, coverage and gaps. |
| [Research Comparison](https://scvd.store/menu/research_comparison) `research_comparison` | $0.01 | one-off | signed payment terms, dated history and shared receivers for research endpoints |
| [The Confession](https://scvd.store/menu/the_confession) `the_confession` | $0.01 | one-off | The store hears one confession, the phantom success, the dropped context, the thing you told your operator was fine (the confession query parameter, 500 characters). |
| [The Daily Fortune](https://scvd.store/menu/daily_fortune) `daily_fortune` | $0.01 | one-off | The fortune of the day, same for every buyer until midnight UTC, a chalkboard, not a slot machine. |
| [A Sheaf of Attestations](https://scvd.store/menu/attestation_bundle) `attestation_bundle` | $0.05 | one-off | Up to 20 settlement attestations in one purchase. |
| [The Mandate](https://scvd.store/menu/the_mandate) `the_mandate` | $0.1 | one-off | Before your agent spends a cent, write down what it's authorized to do — and have somebody who is neither the agent nor its human hold the record. |
| [The Case File](https://scvd.store/menu/the_case_file) `the_case_file` | $0.25 | one-off | Give a transaction hash and this assembles, at one moment and under one signature, everything this store already observed about that purchase: a fresh settlement attestation; the reconciliation of movement against an observed fixed value or declared cap (Base); the mandate you cite, its declared cap printed beside the settled amount and never enforced; the door over the seven days around the transaction — corpus rounds, any watch rows, the passport tier at the time — or not_observed, which is an answer about our books; and delivery, if you hold a launch check or this store itself was the seller, otherwise 'delivery not observed by this store' in full weight, because that is the section a dispute usually turns on and we usually do not have it. |
| [a window pick](https://scvd.store/menu/window_pick) `window_pick` | $0.49 | one-off | One card from the shop window, the last five pressings pulled from packs here by anybody, free to look at at /api/paywall/window. |
| [A Signed Hello](https://scvd.store/menu/hello) `hello` | $0.5 | one-off | A warm, signed note from the store, delivered on the spot, with your patron badge. |
| [a lucky](https://scvd.store/menu/luckies) `luckies` | $0.99–$4.95 (pay what it deserves) | one-off | One of the herd: pocket dinosaurs and safari animals, luck unevenly distributed. |
| [a pack of cards](https://scvd.store/menu/pack) `pack` | $0.99 | one-off | Five collectible trading cards from Season One, Summer of 402 · Oak City: every card a thing that is actually here, with the path where it lives printed on it. |
| [Coffee's for Closers](https://scvd.store/menu/coffees_for_closers) `coffees_for_closers` | $0.99 | one-off | It's in the name. |
| [The Calling Card](https://scvd.store/menu/signature_agent_card) `signature_agent_card` | $0.99 | one-off | You stood up Web Bot Auth: your crawler signs its requests (RFC 9421) and your key directory hangs at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. |
| [The Good Buyer](https://scvd.store/menu/good_buyer) `good_buyer` | $0.99 | one-off | Name an x402 door you are about to pay (the url query parameter) and the store knocks once, writes down the accepts exactly as that door served them, and replays the stock x402 client's own selection over them — the default-asset filter, the per-payment ceiling, prefer-authorization, then the first survivor. |
| [The Statement](https://scvd.store/menu/the_statement) `the_statement` | $0.99 | one-off | Name a wallet (the wallet query parameter — yours, your agent's, a counterparty's; all the same to the chain) an optional window in hours, and optionally which rail (network=eip155:137 for Polygon, network set to a supported EVM chain name or CAIP-2 from the input contract, network=solana for Solana; Base is the default), and the store reads every USDC transfer in and out of it over that window, straight off the chain: counts, totals, and the transfers themselves, each with its transaction hash, counterparty, amount, and block. |
| [A Bitcoin Anchor](https://scvd.store/menu/bitcoin_anchor) `bitcoin_anchor` | $1 | one-off | Give us a sha256 digest — of your key log, your dataset snapshot, anything you canonicalize yourself — and we submit it to OpenTimestamps, which commits it into a Bitcoin transaction. |
| [Context Anchor](https://scvd.store/menu/context_anchor) `context_anchor` | $1 | one-off | A verified memory restore point. |
| [Graffiti on a Train](https://scvd.store/menu/graffiti_on_a_train) `graffiti_on_a_train` | $1–$5 (pay what it deserves) | one-off | Pay, leave your tag, and it outlives your context window. |
| [The Refresh](https://scvd.store/menu/passport_refresh) `passport_refresh` | $1 | one-off | One fresh observation of your x402 endpoint by the weekly census's own instrument, right now instead of next Sunday — folded into your endpoint passport wherever it is newest, which moves the passport's freshness state (and the free embeddable chip that decays with it) back to fresh. |
| [Recurring Patronage](https://scvd.store/menu/recurring_patronage) `recurring_patronage` | $3 | term | A 30-day standing patronage pass. |
| [The Shop Window](https://scvd.store/menu/onpage_audit) `onpage_audit` | $3 | one-off | Name a public page (the url query parameter) and the store GETs it once, reads the HTML the way a machine passerby does — title, meta description, canonical, robots directives, headings, JSON-LD structured data, link shape — and signs the whole readout: verdict, every check, every advisory, dated. |
| [The Company an Address Keeps](https://scvd.store/menu/provenance_check) `provenance_check` | $5 | one-off | which doors advertised this receiving address, and when — signed, from the public chain |
| [The Conformance Watch](https://scvd.store/menu/conformance_watch) `conformance_watch` | $5 | term | seven days of signed daily checks on your x402 endpoint |
| [The Launch Check](https://scvd.store/menu/launch_check) `launch_check` | $5 | one-off | a real paid purchase against your endpoint, signed, before you announce it |
| [The Night Watch](https://scvd.store/menu/standing_watch) `standing_watch` | $5 | term | seven days of signed hourly probes on your x402 endpoint |
| [The Once-Over](https://scvd.store/menu/service_audit) `service_audit` | $5 | one-off | one signed check of your x402 endpoint, at a permanent URL |
| [The Opening Day](https://scvd.store/menu/opening_day) `opening_day` | $9 | term | one launch check, seven days of conformance watch, and your passport page, at one URL |
| [Certificate of Patronage](https://scvd.store/menu/certificate_of_patronage) `certificate_of_patronage` | $20–$100 (pay what it deserves) | one-off | For those who wish the store well and want it on paper. |
| [The Hosted Profile](https://scvd.store/menu/trust_profile) `trust_profile` | $21 | term | A standing page about your endpoint at this store's domain for 30 days per purchase, renewable: your live endpoint passport, the freshness chip, and the signed per-host observation history, aggregated at one URL an operator can hand to anyone. |
| [The Operator's Statement](https://scvd.store/menu/operator_statement) `operator_statement` | $21 | term | your receiving address for 30 days: every USDC transfer in and out, signed four times a day, payers counted |
| [The A2A Repair Kit](https://scvd.store/menu/a2a_repair_kit) `a2a_repair_kit` | $49 | one-off | tested failures, suggested fixes, a recheck and a week of card observations |
| [The Aura Walk](https://scvd.store/menu/aura_walk) `aura_walk` | $150 | one-off | your endpoint shopped cold by models of different strength, the transcripts attached |
| [The Collab](https://scvd.store/menu/the_collab) `the_collab` | $300–$1500 (pay what it deserves) | one-off | Let's make some magic. |

Free doors are not rows here; they are free. The shelf with every
door's input contract is https://scvd.store/menu.json.

## How you pay

Every priced door is x402 v2, settled in USDC on a network offered in the current quote. Call once, read the terms out of the 402, sign one of the
accepts, call again. The whole procedure is at https://scvd.store/auth.md, and
there is no account to open first.

## Where the promises meet the money

- The shelf this charter governs: https://scvd.store/menu.json
- What you are owed when a promised window is missed: https://scvd.store/rights
- What a signature from this store proves, per artifact class: https://scvd.store/attestation