Why a plain screenshot gets challenged, and what to capture instead.
A screenshot is one witness with no chain of custody. Anyone with an image editor, or a browser's developer tools, can produce a convincing picture of a page that never existed. When a screenshot matters in a dispute, the other side's first move is to ask how anyone knows it is real. If the answer is "trust the person who took it", the evidence is weak.
The United States Federal Rules of Evidence describe two categories of records that authenticate themselves, without a live witness. FRE 902(13) covers records generated by an electronic process shown to produce an accurate result. FRE 902(14) covers data copied from an electronic source where the copy is identified by a process of digital identification, which in practice means cryptographic hashes. Both rely on a written certification describing the process. The stronger and better documented the process, the less there is to argue about. (This page describes a technical design, not legal advice. Admissibility is decided case by case.)
Most commercial capture tools improve on a screenshot by adding hashes and a certificate. But the capture still happens inside one company's black box, and the record lives in that company's database. You are still trusting a single witness; it is just a company instead of a person.
exhibit402 takes a different approach. Two browser environments, byte-identical down to a pinned software image digest, hosted by two different companies on two different networks, load the URL at the same frozen instant. If both produce the exact same bytes, the capture is CERTIFIED: two independent machines agreed on every pixel. If they differ, the result is honestly labeled WITNESSED and reports exactly how much they agreed. The artifacts are stored permanently on Arweave, where nobody, including us, can edit or delete them. Every capture also gets an RFC 3161 timestamp from an independent time-stamping authority, and the certificate references the exact versioned description of the automated process by SHA-256, which is the documentation FRE 902(13) certifications are built on.
Verification does not require trusting us. The manifest, the hashes, and the stored bytes are public and permanent. Anyone can recompute every SHA-256 forever, or pay $0.02 for the /verify endpoint to do it for them.
| Service | Price per capture | Model |
|---|---|---|
| exhibit402 | $1.00 full page, $0.50 first screen | Pay per capture. No subscription, no account. |
| ProofSnap | $44.99 done-for-you; pay-as-you-go from about $0.50 | Self-serve plans |
| Page Vault | Outsourced captures from $149 | Software from $195/mo, sold to law firms |
| Pagefreezer | Custom | Enterprise compliance archiving contracts |
Vendor prices from their public pricing pages, August 2026. The expensive services bundle affidavit preparation and litigation support; if you need that workflow, they are good at it. If you need the capture itself, permanently stored and independently verifiable, that is what $1 buys here.
Payment is USDC on Base via the x402 protocol, which means the service is built for software and AI agents to buy directly: POST /capture with {"url": "...", "mode": "fullpage"}. Details in the API spec. If you are a human who wants captures without touching crypto, email dylan.caponi@gmail.com.
exhibit402 · proof of publication · Evidence-grade design is not legal advice.