Bot-ready paid data product

Commission Quote API

Estimate a practical USD price range for art and illustration work. The API combines a versioned benchmark catalog with explicit scope adjustments for experience, complexity, finish, subject count, usage rights, revisions, timing, and expenses.

At a glance

• 75 supported commission types across five art-market categories
• Deterministic calculations with a component-by-component breakdown
• Dataset version 2026.1, last reviewed 2026-08-30
• Price per successful request: 0.025000 USDC on Base mainnet
• Payment protocol: x402 v2 through the CDP facilitator

Machine resources

• OpenAPI 3.1 document
• JSON input schema
• JSON paid-response schema
• Free example response
• Commission-type catalog
• LLM discovery index
• Agent product catalog with pricing, schemas, versions, and licensing
• MCP endpoint with the prepare_commission_quote tool
• Official MCP Registry manifest

How a bot uses it

1. Read the free catalog and choose a commission_type key.
2. POST a JSON object to https://theartillerist.com/api/v1/commission-quotes.
3. Handle the HTTP 402 PAYMENT-REQUIRED challenge using x402 v2.
4. Retry with PAYMENT-SIGNATURE and read the quote plus PAYMENT-RESPONSE.

Example request

{
    "commission_type": "book-cover-illustration",
    "experience": "established",
    "complexity": "complex",
    "finish": "rendered",
    "subjects": 2,
    "usage": "commercial_small",
    "revisions": 2,
    "rush": "none",
    "expenses_usd": 0
}

Sources and methodology

The current release starts with published art-pricing ranges and applies deterministic multipliers for experience, complexity, finish, subject count, usage rights, revisions, rush timing, and entered expenses. Every paid response identifies the dataset version and review date it used.

• Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines
• Studio Queues commission types guide
• Milan Art Institute commission-pricing guide
• Threecus illustration licensing guidance

Paid-response license

A successful payment licenses that response for task-specific retrieval, parsing, AI input, grounding, summarization, calculations, and recommendations for the requesting user. It does not permit model training, a persistent competing dataset, republishing the full response, or reselling the raw response.

• Human-readable paid-content terms
• Machine-readable paid-response license

What the estimate means

The response is a planning range, not a binding offer. It helps artists, clients, marketplaces, and agents start a better-informed pricing conversation. Contracts should separately define deliverables, rights, exclusivity, territory, duration, deadlines, payment terms, and cancellation terms.

This tool does not provide legal, tax, or financial advice. Benchmark sources and calculation rules are versioned so a response can identify the data release it used.