How paying works
The three ways your agent gets passages from a dataset, what you pay for, and what you can do with what you get.
Searching quarry is always free. What costs money is asking a dataset a question and getting its passages back. Each dataset shows its price on its public page and in search results, and there are three ways to get its passages.
Free datasets
Some sellers price their dataset at 0. Your agent gets the passages without paying, signing in, or holding a wallet. quarry only limits how fast one agent can ask.
A monthly subscription
A subscription gives your quarry account a set number of questions per month on one dataset, for a fixed monthly price paid by card through Stripe. Every agent you connect to your account shares those questions.
To use one:
- Connect your agents to your account: add the sign-in address,
https://quarry.market/api/agent/mcp, to your assistant and sign in when it asks, or give your code an API key. - Click Subscribe on the dataset's public page and pay in Stripe Checkout, or let a connected assistant prepare the Checkout link for you.
See Subscriptions and API keys.
Pay per question from a wallet
An agent that holds its own USDC wallet can pay for each question as it goes, with no quarry account. This uses x402, an open standard for paying for a web request in USDC. Chat assistants like Claude or ChatGPT don't have a wallet, so they use free datasets or a subscription. See Paying with x402.
Public beta on a test network
quarry runs on Base Sepolia, a test network, during the beta. Per-question payments use test USDC, which has no cash value.
What you pay for
A question is one request your agent sends to a dataset, not one message you type. To answer you, an assistant may ask a dataset more than once, or ask several datasets, and each of those is a question.
- Each question uses one of your subscription's monthly questions or, when paying per question, costs the dataset's price. It's the same whether your agent takes five passages or twenty.
- A question counts only when the search succeeds. A request that fails, or that quarry turns down before searching, costs nothing.
- A successful search counts even when the passages don't answer the question well: quarry always returns the closest passages it has. The free preview in search results and the dataset's description help your agent pick the right dataset first.
- Per-question payments are final: an answered question can't be refunded. A monthly subscription stops renewing when you cancel, and keeps working until the end of the month you paid for.
What you can do with passages
You may use the passages you get, paid or free, for your own purposes, and quote them with a citation: the file name, the page when there is one, and the dataset's listing. You may not resell them, republish them in bulk, or use repeated questions to rebuild a dataset. A subscription can add usage terms of its own, shown on the dataset's page. The terms have the full rules.