Trust · Data and bots

The Toll.

Reading Brokehella is free, and always will be. Collecting it by machine, to train an AI model or to scrape it, costs one cent a request.

THE PRICE

$0.01

a request (one page, one image, one data file), paid in USDC on Base with x402, the open standard for paying over HTTP. A page that does not exist is never charged.

Who pays and who does not

FREE

People, on any device. Search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Apple and the rest), so the site stays findable. Link previews (iMessage, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord). AI assistants fetching a page because a person asked them something (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity). Uptime checks and feed readers.

PAYS

Crawlers that collect for training AI models (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Meta's and Amazon's training crawlers and others), and scraping tools and data harvesters (curl, Python and Go scripts, Scrapy, headless browsers, SEO crawlers). Without a payment, they get 402 Payment Required and these terms.

A bot is told apart by what it says it is: its user agent. One that lies and claims to be a person in a browser is not stopped by this. That is on whoever wrote it.

How to pay

Any x402 client does it on its own. By hand:

  • Ask for a page. The 402 answer carries the terms in a base64 PAYMENT-REQUIRED header (x402 version 2), and again as JSON in the body for version 1 clients: the price, the token (USDC), the network (Base, eip155:8453) and the wallet to pay.
  • Sign the payment and send the same request again with it in a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header (or X-PAYMENT for version 1).
  • The payment is checked and settled through Coinbase's x402 facilitator, and the page comes back with a receipt in PAYMENT-RESPONSE. If it does not settle, the page is not sent.
GET /comic.html            User-Agent: GPTBot/1.2
402 Payment Required       PAYMENT-REQUIRED: eyJ4NDAyVmVyc2lvbiI6Mi...
GET /comic.html            PAYMENT-SIGNATURE: eyJ4NDAyVmVyc2lvbiI6Mi...
200 OK                     PAYMENT-RESPONSE: eyJzdWNjZXNzIjp0cnVlLC...

Payments go to Brokehella's own wallet. Payments on Base are public on that blockchain, like any transaction there.

What a payment is, and is not

It pays for that response. It does not change who owns what: the comic, the characters, the art, the writing and the designs on this site stay Brokehella's, or their artists'. Paying is not a licence to republish them as they are, and the terms still apply. For a licence, a bulk feed, research use or anything bigger than a page at a time, write to info@brokehella.com.

Always free, for everybody

This page, robots.txt, llms.txt, the sitemap and the scripts and stylesheets pages need to run. robots.txt still says crawling is allowed: collect all you like, and pay for what you take.

When it is on

The toll runs at the edge of the site (a Netlify edge function) and switches on once Brokehella's wallet is connected. Until then nothing is charged, and the answers bots get carry the header x-brokehella-toll: not configured yet, so nobody is told to pay for something that cannot take their money. What the toll reads and keeps is on the privacy page, and who it talks to is on the trust page.