HTTP 402 – Payment Required
Reserved for future use, occasionally seen for API usage limits or paywalls.
Common use case
Some APIs repurpose it informally to signal that a subscription has expired or usage quota has been exhausted and payment is needed to continue.
Example
HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required
{"error":"Subscription expired"}History
Defined in the original HTTP/1.1 spec, RFC 2068 (1997), explicitly reserved "for future use".
Did you know?
Nearly three decades later it is still officially unspecified - the closest thing HTTP has to an easter egg status code, occasionally revived by API providers for billing errors.