Fare Splits

How a paid call to an Unbrowse skill divides into three on-chain shares.

The three lanes

When an agent calls a paid skill via unbrowse execute, the platform's facilitator signs a Faremeter Flex authorization that distributes the price across up to three recipients atomically. The math lives in backend/src/services/flex.ts:computeFlexSplits.

Lane	Share	When it fires
Platform (PLATFORM_BPS = 5000)	50%	Always
Site owner (OWNER_BPS = 1500)	15%	Only when the skill carries owner_compensation_opt_in === true and a verified owner_wallet_usdc_ata (see Claiming a Website)
Contributors (the remainder)	35% when owner is active; 50% otherwise	When the skill has a non-empty contributors[] with at least one wallet_address

The three lanes always sum to exactly 10000 basis points (100%). The Flex on-chain program rejects authorizations that do not sum to 10000 (FLEX_ERROR__SPLIT_SUM_INVALID), so the computation is checked at compile-time-of-trust in the tests at backend/tests/flex-owner-bps.test.ts and backend/tests/flex-owner-bps-edges.test.ts.

Why three lanes instead of two

The pre-claim shape was 50/50 (platform / contributor pool). When a site owner publishes their canonical API or proves ownership via DNS-TXT, they have done work that did not previously exist: surfacing a stable contract for agents to consume. The 15% lane lets that work get paid while preserving a 35% indexer share, the largest single slice for the people doing the discovery and maintenance work.

If the domain is never claimed, indexers absorb the would-be owner share automatically (the contributor pool grows to 50%). No domain has to pay for a missing owner; the math degrades gracefully.

Contributor sub-splits

Within the contributor pool, individual recipients are weighted by cumulative_delta on each SkillContributor record:

contributor_share_i = max(cumulative_delta_i, 0.01) / sum(max(cumulative_delta_j, 0.01))
                    * contributor_pool_bps

The top FLEX_MAX_SPLITS - 1 (or - 2 when the owner lane is active) by cumulative_delta get a slot; the rest are dropped from this settlement (they accrue weight for future calls). The on-chain Flex program caps at 5 split recipients per authorization, so the caller of unbrowse setup cannot be the 99th contributor and silently lose all attribution.

What happens when there are no eligible contributors

• No payable contributors AND no active owner: computeFlexSplits returns an empty array. The caller (backend/src/services/flex-payment-terms.ts:99) falls back to a single-recipient transfer to the platform. The price still settles; no contributor earnings, no owner earnings.

• No payable contributors but owner IS active: the helper folds the unallocated contributor pool back into the platform recipient so the on-chain authorization still sums to exactly 10000 bps. The owner still gets their 1500 bps.

These edge cases are explicitly pinned in backend/tests/flex-owner-bps-edges.test.ts so any future re-tune cannot silently leak basis points.

When the lanes change

The constants PLATFORM_BPS and OWNER_BPS are policy. They live in backend/src/services/flex.ts:39-49 and are the only source of truth for the on-chain settlement math. Doc, dashboard, and frontend copy should never hard-code numbers that disagree with these constants; if a re-tune lands, the docs move with the constants.

The current numbers (50/15/35 when claimed, 50/50 when not) are the live constants as of this writing. They have shipped on origin/main and any earlier prose that called 50/20/30 the live value is stale. If you see a number in production that disagrees with this doc, the constants are still the truth, not the prose.

Settlement rail and timing

• Rail: x402 over Solana, USDC, using @faremeter/flex.

• Cadence: each paid execute signs a Flex authorization off-chain; the platform's facilitator holds the authorization in memory, then submits a batched on-chain settlement after the refund window closes. Distribution is atomic per the signed splits.

• Visibility: unbrowse stats --earnings (CLI), or GET /v1/stats/indexer/:id/ledger, GET /v1/account, GET /v1/analytics/payments (HTTP).

Related

• Claiming a Website — how a site owner verifies DNS ownership and earns the 15% lane

• Rewards & Economics (SDK) — operator-facing pricing + payout details