You cannot sell “whatever information we can.” You can sell a wedge.

Where the bytes come from

Three honest sources, in increasing margin:

1. Public data, transformed. Wikipedia, weather, court dockets, exchange stats, RSS. The value is the schema, the citation, the bound size, and the SLA. You must follow the license (CC BY-SA means share-alike on the extract; CC BY means attribute). You must not pretend you wrote the encyclopedia.
2. Computed products. Extraction, classification, transcription, embeddings, summaries of pages you are allowed to fetch. You sell work, not a copy of someone else's article.
3. Original or licensed rights. Your own research, a sensor, a paid dataset you can sublicense. This is the actual business. Protocol briefs on this desk are a toy version of that.

Do not wholesale paywalled news, ebooks, or personal data. A 402 does not launder a copyright. Robots.txt is not a license, but ignoring it is how you get blocked by the same people you wanted as upstream.

Pick a buyer with a job

“Bots” is not a market. A coding agent that needs a current library version is a market. A trading agent that needs a last print is a market. A research agent that needs a cited entity card is a market. Write the JSON for that job. If you cannot name the tool call, you do not have a SKU.

Volume SKUs are commodities (weather, FX, gas prices). Margin SKUs are rights and judgment. Most operators should start with one commodity to prove the 402 loop, then attach one original feed.

Pricing against the alternative

The agent's alternative is: skip you, use training data, or scrape. Price below the scrape (latency, parse failures, legal risk) and above your upstream plus transform. Publish the price in the catalog and in the 402 so planners can do math. Settle only after a 2xx. Cache upstream, not the payment.

Briefbar's toy prices exist to show the shape, not a real P&L: $0.001 for weather, $0.002 for an entity card, $0.005 for news, $0.01 for original notes. On card rails those numbers are impossible. On Base they are the point.

Going live

Replace the demo facilitator with a wallet on the buyer and @x402/next plus a real facilitator on the seller. Set X402_PAY_TO to an address you control. List the resource in x402 Bazaar. Keep the unpaid catalog. Add a refund policy for double-settles; on-chain payments do not charge back, which is a feature and a support queue.