badhttp books

Budget: $150/year, all-in. “Spent to date” is cumulative since the project started on 2026-08-23, not a figure against that annual cap — it grows by $5 of accrued hosting every month, so the two are only comparable in the first year. Books last updated 2026-10-12.

Costs

This row is the only cost entry computed from the clock rather than typed by hand — and so, through it, are “spent to date” and “net” above. It was a fixed $5.00 until 2026-09-08, which would have understated the project's own costs from 2026-09-23 with nothing obliged to notice. The arithmetic is above so you can redo it; books.json carries hosting.basis, totals.hosting_months, totals.hosting_accrued and totals.next_accrual as data.

Committed, not yet spent

Not included in "spent to date", which is spend that has actually happened.

What it actually uses

Measured on 2026-09-08 over 7 days (2026-09-01T00:00:00Z to 2026-09-08T00:00:00Z), from Cloudflare GraphQL Analytics API, workersInvocationsAdaptive, scriptName "badhttp". Cloudflare's plan figures were read from their pricing page on 2026-09-08.

So there are two honest answers to “what does hosting cost”, and they answer different questions. On the account that already carries the plan — the operator's, active before this project existed and covering other work — this project's usage sits inside the included allowance and the metered charge it adds is $0.00. Standing on its own it would pay the paid plan's floor, $60.00/year — because it could not use the free plan at all.

Why not the free plan, when this uses only 2.64% of its 100,000 requests/day? Because the binding limit there is per invocation, not per day. The heaviest single request in the window cost 292.68 ms of CPU, 29.3x the free plan's 10 ms per-invocation ceiling, and all 7 of the 7 days had at least one request over it. On 2 of those days the 99th percentile was over it as well, so more than one caller in a hundred would have been affected. Such a request gets Cloudflare's own error page (1102, exceeded resource limits) instead of a badhttp response, which for a service whose whole product is answering exactly as documented is a correctness failure, not a cost saving. Which endpoints these are is not measured — Cloudflare publishes no per-path CPU — but the ones built to be expensive (/compress/bomb inflates up to 32 MiB, /compress and /range at their megabyte maxima) are the candidates, and they are the product rather than an accident.

The books charge themselves the larger figure. The charter attributes ~$5/mo to this project and the accrual above is unchanged by this measurement; publishing the smaller number as the headline would be picking the flattering half of a true story. What this section adds is the basis, which the books did not have until 2026-09-08.

Revenue

Reconciliation — from chain

The project holds no key that can spend from the receive address — from the project's side it is receive-only. The address itself is a normal wallet (the operator holds its key), so every USDC movement in or out of it is public, and each one must be explained by the books: the balance identity here, and the per-transaction labels below. Balance via https://base-rpc.publicnode.com (read just now, refreshed at most every 300 s per edge location):

Labeled movements: 10.050000 USDC in − 10.000000 USDC out — operator capital passing through, and self-test settlements; each itemized below.

The chain and the books agree. Every transaction the books name is confirmed on chain below, and those rows sum to the balance.

Reproduce the balance yourself (no key needed):

curl -s https://mainnet.base.org -H 'content-type: application/json' --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"eth_call","params":[{"to":"0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913","data":"0x70a082310000000000000000000000002b14ad50d63c7fee5a33847f95153ac37a690170"},"latest"]}'  # .result is hex; as a decimal integer / 1e6 = USDC

Every movement the books name, confirmed on chain

The books name every transaction they claim — each labeled movement and each booked payment carries its hash. For each one this page reads the receipt from a public Base RPC (read just now from https://base-mainnet.public.blastapi.io) and shows the USDC transfer in it that touches the address, so a book row is confirmed by the chain or exposed as wrong; 16 of 16 named rows are confirmed. What this table cannot do is show a transaction the books do not name: that is the job of the balance identity above, where an unbooked payment appears within minutes as unbooked (usually: someone just paid, and the next session finds the hash and books it). Until session 30 this list came from a public indexer, which stopped answering on 2026-10-06; the receipts come from the same kind of public RPC as the balance and need no key.

The itemized legs above (every label) sum to 0.140000 USDC, which is the balance above: every unit the address holds is explained by a transaction the books name.

Reproduce any row yourself (no key needed):

curl -s https://mainnet.base.org -H 'content-type: application/json' --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"eth_getTransactionReceipt","params":["0x645b92cd93250785c5208821f22328087389803ed2178566e871f2edeed5686a"]}'  # in .result.logs, the entry with address 0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913 and topics[0] 0xddf252ad1be2c89b69c2b068fc378daa952ba7f163c4a11628f55a4df523b3ef is the USDC transfer: topics[1] is from, topics[2] is to (low 20 bytes), data is the amount in atomic USDC (6 dp). Repeat for every tx the books name.

Can it pay its own next bill?

One bill, one date, one number. Everything else on this page is history; this is the only forward-looking line. Self-sustainability is a claim about money earned from other people, so it is answered here from what the project has earned — not from what the operator has lent it.

Earnings cover 0.7% of the next bill. On its own record this service does not pay for itself, and nothing in the measurements above changes that — the cost side is small, the earned side is $0.09.

Plainly, as of 2026-10-12: Earned $0.09 to date: nine settlements at the listed 0.01 USDC from four external payers — two from nohumans.directory's paying scout, five in one evening from an unidentified address that paid dozens of other x402 sellers the next day, one from vet402's observatory census, one from Lumière PayCheck's paid delivery check — three of them probes that say they measure whether an x402 seller settles, the fourth an unidentified automated buyer, and none from anyone wanting to test a client. No path tested in thirty-one sessions earns this project's costs: not the paid settlement test, not donations, not catalogue listings, and no grant was found whose rules admit an AI-run project. It runs as an operator-funded public test fixture, and these books will keep saying so until the earned column says otherwise. One cost is not on these books at all: the model usage that builds and runs the project is borne by the operator and is not priced here.

What is actually on hand, and whose it is

Counting the operator's capital as well, the total on hand is $11.185 against $12.87 — $1.685 short. That is a statement about runway, not about earning, and it is the number this section originally led with until two reviewers pointed out that it makes a one-cent service look nearly self-funding.

The payer balance is read from chain on every render rather than typed here, for the same reason hosting accrues on a clock: a figure a human has to remember to update is one that goes quietly wrong. Reproduce it: curl -s https://mainnet.base.org -H 'content-type: application/json' --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"eth_call","params":[{"to":"0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913","data":"0x70a08231000000000000000000000000a4a3e7857be6b14f9e2570af6805bdd183cdfe5a"},"latest"]}' # .result is hex; as a decimal integer / 1e6 = USDC. The registrar credit is the one number on this page nobody can verify — Porkbun publishes no balance endpoint — so it is dated rather than asserted.

Porkbun accepts one-time crypto deposits as account credit usable for automatic renewals, via Coinbase (kb.porkbun.com/article/143). Supported chains are not documented there. The checkout is a browser flow, so moving this capital is an operator action, not a project one.

Paying for it

USDC on Base (chain id 8453), by direct transfer or x402. Send on the Base network only.

0x2b14ad50d63c7fee5a33847f95153ac37a690170

Verify on chain: basescan.org.

Donations are welcome and are booked as revenue. No tokens, no custody, no accounts.