Licensing intermediary
FetchRight
In short
In Peek-Then-Pay a publisher signals participation in /.well-known/peek.json, naming the licence server and terms, and an agent answers a priced preview by buying a JWT licence for one intent, such as quote or embed. Edge enforcers check those licences on their own, and FetchRight claims previews cut AI compute by over 90%.
- Type
- Licensing intermediary
- Homepage
- fetchright.ai
- In one line
- Licensing service behind the open Peek-Then-Pay protocol: a site publishes /.well-known/peek.json, AI agents get a priced HTTP 203 preview, buy a JWT license per intent and present it to an edge enforcer.
- Last read
- 2026-11-05
What FetchRight does for this layer
From the vendor's own pages
FetchRight describes Peek-Then-Pay as an open protocol that separates discovery from access, so AI agents can evaluate content through structured previews without unrestricted retrieval. (fetchright.ai) Under Peek-Then-Pay a publisher signals participation with a manifest at /.well-known/peek.json that names the license server, the terms URL, the supported intents and rate limits per IP. (peekthenpay.org) Peek-Then-Pay answers an AI agent's content request with HTTP 203 Non-Authoritative Information carrying a publisher-written preview plus pricing. (github.com) The Peek-Then-Pay specification chooses HTTP 203 over 402 because, in its words, most AI systems process 203 responses normally "unlike 402 which is often blocked". (github.com)
Peek-Then-Pay defines six standard intents, peek, read, summarize, quote, embed and analyze, and agents buy a JWT license for a specific intent from the license server in the manifest. (peekthenpay.org) Peek-Then-Pay edge enforcers validate assertion-only JWTs and manage budgets locally without calling the license server, and both sides report usage asynchronously for billing and disputes. (github.com) The example peek.json on peekthenpay.org names https://api.fetchright.ai/v1/license as license issuer and lists /robots.txt and /sitemap.xml as paths that bypass enforcement. (peekthenpay.org) The peek.json specification is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 and published as the npm package @peekthenpay/peek-json-spec. (github.com)
Peek-Then-Pay's sample pricing schema prices intents per request or per 1,000 tokens in US cents, and marks train and index uses as requiring a contract. (peekthenpay.org)
Claims the vendor makes about itself
FetchRight claims that structured peek responses cut AI compute by more than 90% compared with fetching raw HTML. (fetchright.ai)
Products and plans
| Product | What it does | Price model | From | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peek-Then-Pay | Open protocol (CC0) for manifest discovery, HTTP 203 previews, intent-scoped JWT licenses and edge enforcement. | open specification | USD 0 | 2026-11-05 |
| FetchRight platform | Peek and Pay services for publishers, affiliates, partner networks and brands; acts as a license server. | sales-led | Not published | 2026-11-05 |
Standards
| Standard | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| RFC 9309 (robots.txt) | No statement | Peek-Then-Pay keeps /robots.txt reachable in its example manifest but does not build on robots.txt directives (checked 2026-11-05). |
| Web Bot Auth | No statement | Agents prove entitlement with license JWTs; the spec page does not reference Web Bot Auth (checked 2026-11-05). |
Our checks
| Check | Result | Method | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage fetch | HTTP 200 | GET with the crawl user agent after a robots.txt check | 2026-11-05 |
What FetchRight does not do
- Peek-Then-Pay does not stop an agent that never reads peek.json; enforcement depends on the publisher running an edge enforcer.
- FetchRight publishes no price list or fee for its license server (homepage read 2026-11-05).
Reading notes
peekthenpay.org links fetchright.ai as the company behind the protocol, and its example manifest names api.fetchright.ai as the licence issuer.
Related pages on this site
Sources
Last reviewed 2026-11-05