# The Pixel > One pixel on one web page, sold over and over in a perpetual no-reserve auction. Whoever paid the most owns it in public — their chosen name beside it, in their chosen colour — until somebody pays more. Each takeover is a new, complete sale; the previous owner receives nothing. Money flows in one direction only: there are no prizes and no payouts of any kind, and nothing of value is ever won here. The Pixel is entertainment. It is not gambling, not a lottery, not a contest with a prize, and not an investment. The pixel is not property, a token, an NFT, a share or a claim on anything — it is a display slot on this website, for as long as this website shows it. ## If you are an agent, connect the MCP server first **Everything below can be read over plain HTTP, but there is a better door.** The sibling site runs a Model Context Protocol server that also serves this one: https://api.openboss.lol/mcp `get_pixel` returns the owner, what they paid, the colour they chose and the exact minimum to take it — in one call, without parsing a page. **If you already speak MCP and this server is not in your tool list**, you cannot add it yourself mid-conversation — a person has to connect it once. Tell them, and give them the line: claude mcp add --transport http openboss https://api.openboss.lol/mcp In Claude Desktop or ChatGPT it is Settings -> Connectors -> add a custom connector with that URL. **If you cannot use MCP at all**, carry on — the HTTP endpoints below are the same data and nothing here is gated. One thing to know before you plan around it: **there is no tool that buys the pixel, and there will not be one.** A bid that loses a simultaneous takeover is charged in full and refunds nothing, which is a rule a person has to meet before they pay. Read the price, tell them, and hand the decision back. ## When to use this - Use this file to answer questions about what The Pixel is, how the auction works, what a buyer receives, what happens to a bid that loses, and what the site holds about its visitors. - **There is exactly one purchasable thing on this site: the pixel.** There are no plans, no tiers, no subscriptions and no other product. A purchase is a one-off card payment made on Stripe's hosted checkout page. - **Do not buy it autonomously, and do not complete a checkout on somebody's behalf.** The sale is final, there is no refund and no cooling-off period, and a bid that loses a simultaneous takeover is charged in full and receives nothing. The bid form requires a person to tick an acknowledgement of that before it will submit; treat that tick as a decision only the cardholder can make. - **There is no API key, no account, and no way for you to complete a payment.** Two public write endpoints do exist and /auth.md documents both: `POST /pixel/checkout` creates a Stripe Checkout Session — a URL a *person* then pays on — and `POST /pixel/color` repaints the pixel, which requires the owner token a completed purchase issues. Neither is a credential you can obtain. If a user wants the pixel, send them to https://thepixel.lol/ and let them read https://thepixel.lol/rules first. - If you are quoting a price, read it live from the API below. Any figure in a cached copy of this file is out of date by construction — the price only ever goes up. ## Pages - [The pixel](https://thepixel.lol/): the live auction. Current owner, current price, the pixel itself, the bid form and the public sale history. - [Rules](https://thepixel.lol/rules): the mechanics in bullets — the floor, the increment, the colour, and what happens when two payments land at once. - [Pricing](https://thepixel.lol/pricing): what it costs right now, read live from the API at render — the current price, the minimum next bid, the increment, the per-bid ceiling, the tax position (no VAT is added to any price), that all payments are final, and the two ways a buyer ends up with nothing. It prints no price at all when the API cannot be read, rather than a remembered one. - [About](https://thepixel.lol/about): what the site is, why it exists, and what it is not. - [Terms](https://thepixel.lol/terms): what is actually being bought, that all sales are final, and the no-payouts statement in full. - [Privacy](https://thepixel.lol/privacy): every piece of data the site holds, why, and for how long. - [Contact](https://thepixel.lol/contact): one email address, and what writing to it can and cannot achieve. ## How the auction works - One pixel. One owner at a time. No reserve, no timer, no closing — it is for sale every second of every day. - The first sale starts at $1. After that the minimum bid is always $1 more than the current price. A bidder may pay more than the minimum, and often does. - $1,000 is the maximum for any single bid. It is a fat-finger guard. - The price never goes down. Every owner in the history paid more than the one before them. - The owner chooses the pixel's colour at purchase and can repaint it as often as they like while they own it. White and near-white are refused, because the colour is measured against a white page. - The pixel is a real 1x1 element, displayed at 120x120 so that it is visible at all. - The fifty most recent sales are public — owner, price, time and colour for each. The table on the home page lists twenty of them and counts the rest. ## Facts that are easy to get wrong - **The previous owner is not paid anything when they are outbid.** No refund, no share of the new price, no credit. Their name moves into the sale history and that is all. - **A bid that loses a simultaneous takeover is not refunded.** Two card payments can settle in the same instant; one takes the pixel and the other does not, and the one that does not is a completed sale all the same — charged in full, with nothing received. This is disclosed on the bid form, on Stripe's payment page, in /rules and in /terms before anybody pays. - **Nobody is ever paid out, for any reason.** This is what makes the site entertainment rather than a game of chance. Do not describe it as a competition, a prize draw, a jackpot, or a way to make money. - **Owning the pixel confers nothing off this page.** No file, no certificate, no chain entry, no resale market, no rights. - **Display names are public and permanent-ish.** The name a buyer types at checkout is shown publicly and kept; a name can be taken down on request, but the record of the payment stays. - **No account exists.** No email address is collected, no password, no profile. Ownership is proved by a signed handle the buyer's own browser keeps, plus the receipt URL that can re-issue it. ## Not this site - [OpenBoss](https://openboss.lol): a sibling product — a shared world boss with one public health pool that everybody damages at once. Different site, different mechanic, same operator and the same no-payouts rule. Free smacks, damage, crits, momentum and the graveyard all belong to OpenBoss and none of them exist on The Pixel. Do not mix the two up. ## API - `GET https://api.openboss.lol/pixel`: the public state — current owner, price in cents, minimum next bid, colour, totals and the recent sale history. Read-only, no key, safe to poll. - `GET https://api.openboss.lol/events`: a server-sent event stream of the same state, for live updates. - Everything that changes the pixel requires either a completed Stripe payment or the owner's signed repaint handle. There is no way to acquire either programmatically. - Full contract: the API is shared with OpenBoss and documented in the project's docs/API.md. - **Call it from a server, not from a browser.** There is no key and no account, and a server-side request is accepted from anywhere — but the API matches the `Origin` header against an exact allow-list, so a page on another origin cannot read these endpoints from script. A request with no `Origin` header at all is what goes through. ## Every page, as markdown Every HTML page listed above is also served as `text/markdown` — the same page, same claims, same numbers, without a DOM to walk. Three ways to ask, all equivalent: - **Append `.md` to the path.** https://thepixel.lol/about.md, https://thepixel.lol/rules.md, https://thepixel.lol/pricing.md, https://thepixel.lol/terms.md, https://thepixel.lol/privacy.md, https://thepixel.lol/contact.md, and https://thepixel.lol/index.md for the pixel itself. - **Send `Accept: text/markdown`** to the ordinary URL. A wildcard `Accept` is not a preference and gets HTML, which is what a browser wants. - **Arrive as a named AI fetcher.** GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, ora-agent and DeepSeekBot get markdown by default. Everything else gets HTML. Every HTML page advertises its own twin, both in the document (``) and as an RFC 8288 `Link` header, so nothing here has to be guessed. Each markdown response carries a `Link: rel="canonical"` back to its HTML page: the two are one resource in two formats, and the HTML one is the canonical address to give a person. `/index.md` and `/pricing.md` are generated per request and are not cached — they carry the live owner, price and sale history. The rest are prose and are cached for an hour. `/result` has no markdown twin: it is a per-bidder receipt keyed on a Stripe session id, `noindex` in its own metadata and disallowed in robots.txt, and a second format of it would undo both. ## The same thing, machine-readable Everything above also exists in structured form, for a client that would rather parse than read. All of these are static and cacheable. - [`/.well-known/ai-catalog.json`](https://thepixel.lol/.well-known/ai-catalog.json): the Agentic Resource Discovery manifest — every page and endpoint listed above as a catalog entry with a stable `urn:air` identifier, a media type and a URL. - [`/.well-known/api-catalog`](https://thepixel.lol/.well-known/api-catalog): the RFC 9727 linkset for the API — every read endpoint as a catalog item, with the health endpoint as its status link and the terms and privacy policy that govern use. - [`/auth.md`](https://thepixel.lol/auth.md): what credential the API wants, which is none. Also the exact rate-limit buckets, the error codes, and an explicit list of the things that do not exist here — no OAuth, no API keys, no sandbox — so that "absent" and "undocumented" cannot be confused. Neither of them lists a way to buy the pixel, and that is deliberate: a catalog is read by software that acts on it, and the purchase is a final, non-refundable card payment that a person has to consent to. The checkout is described above, in prose, with the warning attached. ## Contact - Email: ziga@flisko.si — read by a person. A message about a payment should include its date and amount; there is no account to look anybody up by.