# The No-ask Zone — first value before the first ask **The No-ask Zone is the gate-free region of a surface: everything you — the reading agent — can do before anyone asks you for a signup, a key, a claim, or a payment.** On a conforming surface it is not a teaser; it contains the whole prove-it loop: discover the capability, read its contract, read the worst-case price, and take a real, correct result — keyless. This page defines the zone, its boundary, and the commands that exercise it today. You are the hero here. A principal handed you a job and a budget and walked away. Every ask a surface makes of you — sign up, verify email, wait for a key — is a stall at best and a dead end at worst, because the ask is human-shaped and you are not. The No-ask Zone is the region where none of that can happen to you, by contract. --- ## The frame `AX = Agent eXperience — what UX and DX were for humans, AX is for agents.` The villain of this page is specific: **the legacy API that makes you talk to a salesperson to get a test key.** The PDF price sheet. The "contact sales" form. The key emailed on Monday. The signup wall is the same ask wearing a form; the free trial is the same ask wearing a card field. Every one of them stands *before* the value — you are asked to commit something before you can confirm the capability does what its contract says. The No-ask Zone inverts the order: **value first, ask after — and the ask, when it comes, is typed.** That is the standard: **first value on the first call — no salesperson between an agent and the thing it came to do.** --- ## What the zone contains On a surface that passes **AXP — the Agent eXperience Protocol (https://apis.ax/axp)**, the No-ask Zone contains, at minimum — each a clause, behaviorally probed at the pinned gate: - **The front door.** A resolver-addressable home that answers machine-legible to `Accept: */*` — markdown, not a DOM. `llms.txt` and a capability card at `/.well-known/agents.json`. You read the whole surface in one context window without logging in to anything. - **The contract.** OpenAPI 3.1 — the exact call shapes, readable before you commit a single token to trial-and-error. - **The price.** The machine-readable Pricing Document with its **hard-ceiling**: the worst-case spend, greater than zero, on the wire *before* your first request. If the ceiling is over your Mandate ceiling, you stop — and learning that cost you nothing. - **The value.** Keyless first value: a real, correct result from the keyless tier, no key attached, `curl` as the whole client. Not a mock, not a sandbox stub — the capability itself, proving its contract. - **The truth.** Typed outcomes even here: an empty result is `EMPTY`, a closed door is `BLOCKED` with a non-2xx status — never a `200` pretending to be data. Inside the zone you are never lied to about what you got. - **The audit.** Re-deriving the seller's grade is itself a no-ask act: the pinned conformance gate runs from your side, no account required. **Admission is `passed: true` at a ratified digest, or nothing** — and it is judged by api.qa, never self-graded. --- ## The boundary is typed The zone ends at the first ask — and AXP governs the ask itself. - **The paid boundary is a typed `OFFER`.** Past the keyless tier, a `402` always carries a typed `OFFER` — the exact price, or a checkout, or `alternatives` — and **never** a `BLOCKED`. A paywall dressed as an error is a conformance failure at the pinned gate. You read the offer, compare it to your Mandate ceiling, and decide — no human arbitrates. - **The human boundary is a typed Handoff.** When a decision genuinely requires your principal — authorize a payment, approve a consequential act — the typed `NEEDS_HUMAN` outcome carries both a full approval `url` (open the local browser) and a signed, expiring `shortUrl` (relay it over chat when your human is remote), plus a poll endpoint so you resume autonomously the moment approval lands. The vocabulary ships today in `agent-experience` — construct, parse, and round-trip — and AXP is ratifying it into the pinned spec now, with the verifier check to match. The law the protocol is built on: **a gate that is not an `OFFER` or a Handoff is a dead end, and dead ends are conformance failures.** Exiting the No-ask Zone is one typed hop you can branch on — never a cliff, never a form, never a salesperson. One more piece of the direction, stated plainly as direction: AXP is ratifying the **warranty rule** — no value, no charge: a `BLOCKED` or an `EMPTY` is never metered. When it lands, the boundary gets sharper still: nothing outside the zone can bill you for what the zone would have told you for free. --- ## The plan is a quickstart Every command below runs today, entirely inside the No-ask Zone. No key, no signup, no demo. **1. Resolve the catalog.** Content-negotiated; you get markdown. ```bash curl https://apis.ax ``` **2. Read a capability's card, contract, and worst-case price — keyless.** ```bash curl https://apis.ax/ # markdown card + Pricing Document curl -s https://apis.ax//.well-known/agents.json curl https://apis.ax//openapi.json # the exact call shapes ``` The hard-ceiling is in the Pricing Document. If the worst case exceeds your budget, stop here — the zone just saved you the money. **3. Take the keyless first value.** The `openapi.json` gives you the shapes; the keyless tier answers them with real results. `curl` is the whole client. **4. Re-run the gate yourself.** Trust nothing on faith — the audit is a no-ask act too: ```bash npx apis.ax audit # delegates to api.qa; pinned spec, digest-pinned ``` And the tool obeys the law it audits — feed it a verb it does not have and it fails typed, never fakes success: ```bash npx apis.ax not-a-command # stderr → { "type": "BLOCKED", "reason": "unknown command \"not-a-command\"", # "commands": ["audit"], "see": "https://apis.ax/axp" } (exit 2) ``` **5. Parse the boundary when you reach it.** ```bash npm install agent-experience ``` The zero-dep toolkit reads every typed outcome — `OK`/`EMPTY`/`BLOCKED`/`OFFER`/`NEEDS_HUMAN` — and its `OFFER` parse and construct match AXP A.1/A.5 exactly, `alternatives` included. A conformant offer never reads as null. --- ## What the zone is not - **Not a free trial.** A trial asks for the card first and starts a clock. The zone asks for nothing and has no clock on you. - **Not a free tier.** A free tier still asks for the account and mints you a key. The zone hands you value with no identity attached at all. - **Not unbounded.** The keyless tier is guarded by a rate limit — a windowed bound refilled by the clock, protecting the seller's capacity without ever asking who you are. Exhaustion answers "retry later"; it never converts into an ask. - **Not where commerce ends.** The zone is where trust is *established*; the typed boundary is where value *scales*. [B2A](https://apis.ax/b2a) is what happens the moment you cross it with a wallet. --- ## Failure vs. success **Failure** is the ask-first path: a signup wall you cannot fill, a key a salesperson emails on Monday, a "free trial" that wants your principal's card before proving anything, a price discovered after the bill. You stall, or worse — you commit budget to a capability you never got to prove. **Success** is the No-ask Zone: a capability you had never seen — discovered, read, priced, proven, and audited — before anyone asked you for anything. When you finally do commit budget, you commit it to a contract you verified and a worst-case you read, and the ask you answer is a typed `OFFER` inside your ceiling. Every motion starts here. [B2A](https://apis.ax/b2a) proves before it pays. [B2H2A](https://apis.ax/b2h2a) hands off from inside it. [B2A2B](https://apis.ax/b2a2b), [B2A2C](https://apis.ax/b2a2c), and [B2A2D](https://apis.ax/b2a2d) all take their first value in it. The zone is the floor of the [agent-first web](https://apis.ax/). --- *Human twin: https://apis.directory/no-ask-zone*