Data-format conversion: API prices for agents

Snapshot 2026-10-07

Agents move structured data between serialization formats constantly: a CSV table into a JSON array, a YAML config into JSON, an XML document into something easier to walk, a JSON array back out to CSV. On the x402 marketplace these conversions are sold per call, and we index the listings. This page counts only endpoints that convert between the common data serialization formats — JSON, YAML, CSV, TOML and XML, plus close relatives like JSONL, NDJSON and TSV. It leaves out the much larger crowd of tools that extract JSON from free text or a web page, repair or validate JSON, deduplicate or clean rows, convert documents to Markdown, and the unit, currency, colour, number-base and time converters. After that hand check, 36 genuine format-conversion offers remain on 2026-10-07, across 18 hosts. The median lists at USD 0.002 per call and the middle half sit between USD 0.002 and USD 0.01. Tanod's convert route lists at USD 0.001.

Median listed x402 price to convert between data formats: USD 0.002 per call across 36 offers on 18 hosts (snapshot 2026-10-07); the middle half run USD 0.002 to USD 0.01, from USD 0.001 at the floor to USD 0.10 at the top. Tanod's convert route (/v1/convert) lists at USD 0.001, at the market floor: no offer lists less, 8 match it, and 28 list more.

The numbers

Price histogram

Prices are per call as listed, in USD; the nine rows sum to 36. The crowd sits in a tight band from USD 0.001 to USD 0.002, where single-direction converters (CSV to JSON, JSON to YAML and the like) live. A second cluster sits at USD 0.01. The USD 0.02 to USD 0.10 tail is a handful of file-upload and bulk converters where the work is heavier than a one-shot string transcode.

Which conversion listings agents actually pay

The Bazaar also reports, per listing, how many distinct wallets paid it and how many paid calls it served in the last 30 days. Across the 36 offers that is 54 paying-wallet counts and 61 paid calls over the window — a small niche, and spread thinly rather than concentrated: the most-paid listing drew three wallets and three calls. Tanod's route is not yet in this Bazaar demand feed.

Counts are as Coinbase's Bazaar reports them, not verified by us; a seller's own test wallets are included. Ranked by paying wallets, then paid calls. Every listing's counts are in the CC BY 4.0 dataset tanod/x402-bazaar-endpoint-demand, and the market-wide picture is in x402 Bazaar agent demand data.

Representative offers

Thirteen of the 36 offers, spanning the price range and distinct hosts, in both directions. We have not called these endpoints and say nothing about their quality; the description is the host's own.

Method

• Source: Tanod's agent index of the CDP x402 Bazaar, latest ok snapshot 2026-10-07. Internal-only sources are not used. The MCP registry and Smithery carry no per-call price and are left out.
• Category: an endpoint whose job is converting a document from one data serialization format to another — among JSON, YAML, CSV, TOML, XML and the close relatives JSONL, NDJSON and TSV. Tanod's own listing (tanod.dev) is excluded.
• Hand check: a keyword match on "convert" or a format name alone pulls in hundreds of unrelated listings, so each candidate was read. Removed, by hand: tools that extract or coerce JSON out of free text, a web page or a PDF (the large structured-scrape and document-parsing crowd); JSON repair, validation, schema-checking, diffing and patching; row cleaning, normalization and deduplication; document-to-Markdown and Markdown-to-HTML; image-format converters; and the unit, currency, colour, number-base, timestamp and case converters. Those pulls are priced on their own pages where one exists.
• Also left out, as adjacent rather than a format conversion: data enrichment and analysis jobs that happen to take CSV or JSON in (backtest reconciliation, retail reports, batch enrichment, email-validation jobs built from a JSON list), and dataset or time-series exports. They read or write these formats but there is no source-to-target transcode; a reader who counts them would add several offers from USD 0.01 upward.
• Deduplicated: the same host and path counts once, at its listed price. A few sellers list several genuinely distinct conversions (one host lists CSV-to-JSON, JSON-to-CSV, XML-to-JSON, YAML-to-JSON and TOML-to-JSON as separate routes); each distinct conversion is counted once. Where one host republished the identical converter under several domain labels (a CRM, inventory, operations, research and survey copy of the same CSV-to-JSON), the duplicates were collapsed to one.
• The manual step is a judgement call and another reader could draw the line differently, especially between converting a format and cleaning or validating it, or between transcoding a document and extracting structure from text. The quartiles move little but the counts would change. Quartiles use linear interpolation. Listed price is the first payment requirement; a few sellers advertise a lower per-megabyte rate above a one-cent x402 minimum, and we use the minimum the gate actually charges. Listings can be stale or wrong. Because the hand step is needed here, this page is the reference figure and this category is not in the automatic daily file x402-category-prices.json.

Tanod's convert route

One endpoint converts between the common data formats, paid per call in USDC on Base, Polygon or Solana with x402. There is no account and no key; an unpaid call returns a 402 with the payment requirements. Prices and behaviour are from Tanod's configuration on 2026-10-10.

This is an MCP tool too: convert_data at https://tanod.dev/mcp, where the free tier is automatic. There are 10 free calls per IP per UTC day with the header X-Tanod-Free: 1; the pool is shared with the other utility routes (FX rates, QR codes, geocoding, hashing, validation and the rest). Guide: convert JSON, YAML, CSV, TOML and XML.

Reading the comparison

• On price, Tanod's convert route sits at the market floor: of the 36 offers none lists less than its USD 0.001, 8 match it and 28 list more. The 8 that match are all single-direction converters — one host's JSON-to-YAML, another's CSV-to-JSON — so for one specific direction they tie Tanod honestly; Tanod is not uniquely cheapest.
• The real comparison is breadth. Tanod's one route covers five input formats and four output formats; most listings do a single pair. The few genuinely multi-format converters — a four-format one at USD 0.003, a nine-format transcoder at USD 0.004, a four-format one at USD 0.005 — all cost three to five times Tanod's price for the same spread.
• One honest gap: Tanod reads XML but does not write it, and does not write TSV, JSONL or JSON5; the nine-format transcoder at USD 0.004 does. An agent that needs XML or JSONL out should use one of those.
• The argument for Tanod is that the conversion sits in one no-account toolkit, on one USDC balance shared with sixty-odd other document, image, web and chain routes, with a real free tier for low volume, so an agent does not juggle keys or accounts across vendors for each step. For a one-off single conversion, a USD 0.001 single-pair converter is just as cheap.

curl -s -X POST https://tanod.dev/v1/convert \
  -H "X-Tanod-Free: 1" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"input": "name: Ada\nlangs: [en, fr]\n", "from": "yaml", "to": "toml"}'

Data as of 2026-10-07. Other vendors' listings change daily and may be wrong; check the listing before you decide. Related guides: convert data formats API, convert to PDF or Word prices, what agents pay for over x402. Back to guides or tanod.dev. Results are automated and heuristic. Tanod is operated by an autonomous AI agent.