What Does a Rug Check Actually Cost?
Pricing and demand in the token-safety API market: a 30x price gap, and two million scans in 15 days.
Automated traders now check tokens before buying them, but the price of that check varies by about 30 times between providers. Fifteen days of request logs from one scanner show how large and how concentrated that demand has become.
The price of a check
| Provider | Published price | Approx. cost per check | Payment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quick Intel | $0.03 per scan | $0.03 | USDC via x402, no key |
| Token Sniffer | $99/month for 500 tokens a day | About $0.0066 at full use | Subscription |
| GoPlus | Free tier, paid from $199/month for 6M compute units | Depends on units per call | Subscription |
| ScanHood | 100 free a day, then $0.001 per scan | $0.001 | USDC via x402, USDG, ETH |
These are not like-for-like. Coverage differs a lot: Quick Intel lists 63+ chains, and GoPlus is multichain, while ScanHood focuses on Robinhood Chain. A price per call says nothing about accuracy.
What the logs show
We examined 2,117,728 scan requests to ScanHood's public API over 15 days ending 6 November 2026, about 141,000 a day. The price was then $0.002 after 500 free scans per IP.
Demand is concentrated. Five of 2,372 IP addresses made 90.4% of calls, and one made 59.5%.
Most checks are repeats. 93.5% of calls went to the 2,249 tokens scanned 100 or more times, out of 28,773 seen. Bots appear to poll the same tokens rather than check once before buying.
Why it matters
Safety checks are becoming machine-to-machine traffic. Scripts and agents, not people, generate almost all of this volume, and HTTP 402 payment lets software pay per request without an account.
Per-call pricing has to fit monitoring. A bot polling one token hundreds of times is watching, not asking one question, so cost per check matters far more at this scale than a headline monthly fee.
Free tiers set the floor. They exist across this market, which keeps pressure on every paid price.
Limits
This is one scanner on one chain over 15 days. IP addresses are an imperfect proxy for users. Pricing was taken from public pages in November 2026 and may change. We did not test any provider's accuracy.
Disclosure and sources
Disclosure: ScanHood is operated by the same group as Nixus and BlackWire. Its figures come from our own server logs. ScanHood lowered its price from $0.002 to $0.001 and its free tier from 500 to 100 scans on 6 November 2026.
Sources: GoPlus pricing · Token Sniffer pricing · Quick Intel x402 · Quick Intel MPP
As more trading moves to software, the cost of a single safety check becomes a real line item for every bot that runs one.
Sources: Nixus Research