Sanity-check expenses, salaries, and metrics against real-world benchmarks (BLS, IRS, GSA) via statistical anomaly detection.
What it does
AgentUtil Norm is a lightweight API that lets AI agents and applications validate whether a given numeric value — an expense, salary, metric, or other figure — is within normal range compared to published industry benchmarks. You POST a category (e.g. `expense:travel:hotel_nightly`), a numeric value, and optional context like region or company size. The service returns a percentile ranking against reference data sourced from BLS, GSA, and IRS datasets, along with an assessment and baseline distribution (p25, p50, p75, p90).
Three endpoints are available: `/v1/check` for single-value lookups at $0.002 per request, `/v1/batch` for checking up to 100 items at $0.001 per item, and `/v1/categories` (free) to browse the full taxonomy of supported baseline categories. The service advertises sub-50ms response times for pure data lookups. A free tier of 10 queries per day per IP is available with no signup required; paid access uses the x402 protocol settling in USDC on Base.
The API ships with a full OpenAPI 3.1 spec and agent discovery metadata (agent-service.json, agent.json). Note that during probing the endpoint returned HTTP 400 rather than the expected 402 payment challenge when called without a body, which may indicate the endpoint validates the request body before issuing a payment challenge, or the free tier absorbed the request. The service is otherwise responsive (root returns 200).
Capabilities
Use cases
- —An autonomous agent validating whether a proposed hotel expense is within normal range before approving a reimbursement
- —Batch-checking a list of employee salaries against industry benchmarks to flag outliers during an audit
- —An AI assistant verifying that a quoted contractor rate is reasonable for a given region and company size
- —Automated expense report review that flags line items above the 90th percentile
Fit
Best for
- —AI agents that need quick reality checks on numeric values before taking action
- —Expense management and approval workflows
- —Salary benchmarking and compensation analysis
- —Automated auditing pipelines that need statistical anomaly flags
Not for
- —Real-time financial market data or stock prices
- —Custom or proprietary benchmark datasets — this uses published government data only
- —Free high-volume usage — the free tier is limited to 10 queries/day per IP
Quick start
curl -X POST https://norm.agentutil.net/v1/check \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"category": "expense:travel:hotel_nightly",
"value": 450,
"unit": "USD",
"region": "US"
}'Example
Request
{
"unit": "USD",
"value": 450,
"region": "US",
"category": "expense:travel:hotel_nightly"
}Response
{
"unit": "USD",
"value": 450,
"summary": "$450/night is at the 85th percentile for US hotel expenses, above average but within the normal range.",
"baseline": {
"p25": 120,
"p50": 189,
"p75": 310,
"p90": 520,
"source": "GSA per-diem rates 2024"
},
"category": "expense:travel:hotel_nightly",
"assessment": "above_average",
"percentile": 85
}Endpoint
Quality
Full OpenAPI 3.1 schema with clear request/response definitions and pricing metadata. However, the x402 payment challenge was not captured (endpoint returned 400 instead of 402), no actual response examples were provided in the crawl, and /docs, /pricing, /api all return 404. The response example above is inferred from the schema, not observed.
Warnings
- —Probe did not capture a 402 x402 payment challenge — endpoint returned 400 on POST without a body, so live x402 payment flow could not be verified
- —No actual API response was observed; the example response is inferred from the OpenAPI schema
- —Documentation pages (/docs, /api, /pricing) all return 404
Citations
- —Baseline reality checks for AI agents using BLS, GSA, IRS data sourceshttps://norm.agentutil.net
- —POST /v1/check costs $0.002 per request; POST /v1/batch costs $0.001 per item; GET /v1/categories is freehttps://norm.agentutil.net
- —Free tier: 10 queries/day per IP, no signup required; paid via x402 protocol (USDC on Base)https://norm.agentutil.net
- —OpenAPI 3.1 spec with full request/response schemashttps://norm.agentutil.net
- —Sub-50ms response times for pure data lookupshttps://norm.agentutil.net