alt.hn

3/21/2026 at 2:09:08 AM

purl: a curl-esque CLI for making HTTP requests that require payment

 https://www.purl.dev/

by bpierre

3/21/2026 at 5:57:25 AM

A couple questions:

- The default seems to make the payment without confirmation. What stops an endpoint from changing payment amount between an inspect request and the actual request?

- Will adoption of this payment protocol ever grow large enough for anyone to implement this on either the client or server?

- Bots have more of a financial incentive to crawl sites than a human. I doubt this will actually stop anything

- I see a AGENTS.md. How much of this is vibe coded? It's near impossible to get a sense of the care taken to review LLM output. Hard to trust with money.

by acheong08

3/21/2026 at 7:26:10 AM

It only took us 29 years but HTTP 402 Payment Required might finally mean something on a wider scale…

by connorgurney

3/21/2026 at 5:18:20 PM

While I can understand the rationale behind it, I can't imagine this being used for anything that requires low latency requests.

I imagine the flow would be something like (correct me if I'm wrong) [client request] -> [backend returns an error]/[accepts the request and waits for payment] -> [client sends the money] -> [backend accepts the transaction] -> [backend returns the requested data]. All of this sounds like a huge bloat over the current API key/token system.

by rbtms

3/21/2026 at 8:32:54 AM

An annoying trend I've been seeing recently, which the GitHub repo behind this does, is having better documentation for the robots than there is for the users.

Compare the README.md to the skills/pay-for-http-request/SKILL.md

by kiallmacinnes

3/21/2026 at 8:02:09 AM

Uncharacteristically unclear marketing from Stripe!

You're gonna have to give me more to go off of than this.

by rtpg

3/21/2026 at 6:12:59 AM 

  user@NAS:~$ curl -fsSl https://www.purl.dev/install.sh | bash
  ...
  purl: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.38' not found (required by purl)
  
  user@NAS:~$ uname -a
  Linux NAS 6.1.0-43-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.162-1 (2026-02-08) x86_64 GNU/Linux

by gforce_de

3/21/2026 at 9:15:19 AM

[dead]

by up2itnow0822

3/21/2026 at 5:32:54 AM

[dead]

by throwaway-538