Frequently asked questions

Skim is a clean URL-to-markdown reader for agents. Your agent sends a URL and gets back clean, agent-ready markdown plus structured metadata — typically in about a second. The card API key sk402_ is the default path (1,000 credits, no wallet). USDC on Base via x402 is optional.

Clean markdown of the page's main content, a plain-text version, and structured metadata (title, author, published date, canonical URL, word count). Need typed JSON instead of prose? Use /v1/extract with your own schema.

Skim is deliberately narrow — one URL in, clean markdown out — and priced for agents, not LLM-token rates. You can start with a free API key (no wallet, no crypto). Teams that want invoices use a card plan. Agents that already have a Base wallet can pay per call instead. It's not a search engine and not a site-wide crawler.

Median read is well under a second for typical pages, and output is around 4x smaller than raw HTML — so your agent spends fewer tokens and less time per page. We benchmark against alternatives continuously and Skim comes back consistently faster on normal pages.

Articles, docs, blog posts, news, product pages — anything with real content in the HTML. Pages behind hard paywalls or heavy bot walls may fail; when a site blocks a read, Skim escalates to a full browser render automatically before giving up, and a failed read costs you nothing.

Yes — POST /api/t/crawl takes a site origin or start URL, walks sitemap.xml and same-origin links, and returns up to 25 important pages as clean markdown. Each successful page costs 1 credit on the same /t/read ledger. Need a single page? Use /t/read. Try it in the Workbench.

Yes. Create a free API key on the homepage (1,000 credits, no wallet), or start the monthly Free Plan — card on file, never charged, 1,000 reads every month. Beyond that, reads cost fractions of a cent.

Paying per call: $0.002 per read, $0.015 per structured extract, $0.005 per Signal poll. Paying by card: plans start free (1,000 reads a month) and go up from 5, where a standard read is one credit. See pricing and card plans for details.

No. Paying per call, payment settles only when a read succeeds — if a page can't be read, you don't pay. On card plans, failed reads are refunded to your credit balance automatically.

Start with a free sk402_ key, or a card plan — normal credit card, real invoices, cancel anytime. Agents that already have a funded wallet can optionally pay per call in USDC instead.

Only if you want one. Card plans are monthly with a generous free tier. Paying per call has no plan at all — your bill is exactly proportional to what your agent actually did.

Card plans come with real invoices and a dashboard showing credits remaining. Per-call payments each produce their own receipt. Either way, totals tie out exactly to per-read prices — no estimated usage.

Skim holds no credentials for the pages it reads and has no access to your systems — it takes a URL and returns text. Treat your sk402_ key like any other API secret; on the optional wallet path, use a small dedicated wallet. Fetches are SSRF-protected: private, loopback, and cloud-metadata address ranges are rejected at every redirect hop.

Operational basics only: call metadata like timing, response size, and payment settlement. We don't store the specific URLs individual callers submit. Fetched content is processed transiently and may be briefly cached to improve performance — see the privacy policy for the full picture.

Easiest: create a free API key on the homepage and send it as Authorization: Bearer sk402_… to /api/t/read. Copy-paste snippets are in the docs. The MCP server (npx -y skim-mcp) defaults to SKIM_API_KEY=sk402_…; wallet pay with SKIM_WALLET_PRIVATE_KEY is optional. Connectors also live on GitHub.

The connectors, MCP server, and agent tooling are open source on GitHub. The reader service itself is not.

Email hello@skim402.com — we read every message.