Restate

# Fix list: Restate

From Anchor Terminal's listing at https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/restate, the October 2026 research run, assessed 8 October 2026. Grade BB, 73.3 out of 100.

This is everything the published grade says the listing lacks, the biggest possible gain to the total first. It comes from the reason given for each score, the checklist each category was scored against (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist), the provenance checks, the deductions, what we couldn't check and what the review panel asked for. A fix counts at the next check, once it's public.

For a coding agent working on Restate: work through the items below in the product, its docs and its public pages. Each category gives the reason for its score, with the points each checklist item earned, and the checklist itself, so the gap is the items that earned less than their points. Change the product, not the wording, and keep a note of what you changed and where it's published.

## 1. Payments & pricing, 40 out of 100, up to 7.5 more on the total

Why it scored 40: No machine payment protocol (0). Per-unit prices are public on restate.dev/pricing, $25 per million extra actions on Starter and Business and $15 on Premium, though the table is drawn by script and absent from the page's HTML (20). Free plan of 100,000 actions a month with no card (20). A person signs up in the browser for Restate Cloud (0). The server also runs locally with no account, but the rubric scores the hosted option.

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-payments):

The published rubric, also on the [x402 page](https://www.anchorterminal.com/x402/).

- 40, a machine payment protocol (x402, MPP or L402) on the tool's own endpoints. 10 to 30 when it covers only some endpoints or only goes through a third party, and the note says which.
- 20, per-call or per-unit pricing published without a login. 10 for public plan-only pricing, 0 for "contact sales" or prices behind a login.
- 20, a free tier or trial that doesn't need a card.
- 20, autonomous onboarding, meaning an agent can get access without a person signing up in a browser (keyless use, x402, a programmatic key API).

Payment platforms and agent wallets rarely charge for their own API over a machine protocol, so the first line has steps for them, and the highest one that applies counts. 40 when x402, MPP or L402 runs on all their own endpoints, 30 when it runs on part of their own API, 25 when their merchants can accept one, 20 for running a facilitator, 15 for paying as a buyer, and 0 when the only protocol is their own. Merchant acceptance sits above a facilitator because the platform's own customers can charge agents through it, while a facilitator settles for sellers who wire up the protocol themselves. The counter-argument (a facilitator does more for the protocol as a whole) has a point. Each note says which step applied.

Open-source software you run yourself is scored on its hosted or paid option if it has one. A free, self-hosted package with nothing to buy gets 20, 20 and 20 for the last three lines, and 0 to 40 for the first only if it ships a payment protocol.

## 2. Security & auth, 61 out of 100, up to 6.8 more on the total

Why it scored 61: Graded as Restate Cloud. API keys (`key_...`) are created per environment with a role and sent as a Bearer token. The docs show Full and Admin roles and we couldn't read the full list or the revocation controls in the Cloud UI (22 of 30). No documented way to put the key in a query string. Roles on keys, private services that the ingress won't expose, request signing with an ED25519 key so services accept calls only from their environment, and teams with RBAC, with SAML SSO and SCIM on Premium and Enterprise. Nothing asks for confirmation before an Admin key kills or purges an invocation (12 of 20). It returns the caller's own data and the approver's payload (10). Each invocation's journal is visible in the UI and by SQL for 1 day on Free up to 30 days on Premium, and OTEL export starts at Business. No log of who resolved an awakeable was found (8 of 15). The BYOC docs say Restate is SOC 2 Type I certified with a Type II audit under way, and a HIPAA BAA is sold as an add-on. restate.dev/.well-known/security.txt returns 404, the server repository has no SECURITY.md, and no bounty or published advisory was found (9 of 20). The self-hosted server is weaker by design, since the docs say its ingress and admin ports carry no authentication and expect a proxy in front.

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-security):

- 0 to 30, the credential model. 30 for OAuth 2.1 with scopes, or scoped and revocable keys with rotation. 20 for plain revocable API keys. 10 for one all-powerful key. 10 off when a secret can travel in a URL query string as a documented option.
- 0 to 20, read-only or least-privilege modes, and confirmation or approval for destructive actions.
- 0 to 15, prompt-injection posture where the tool returns untrusted content (documented mitigations or guidance). A tool that returns no untrusted content gets 10.
- 0 to 15, audit logs or per-call visibility for the operator.
- 0 to 20, a security programme. security.txt or a disclosure policy, a bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001, advisories handled in public.

Models are read for retention, whether API data trains models (and whether that's off by default), zero-retention options and certifications. Frameworks for telemetry defaults, approval hooks, guardrails and sandboxing.

## 3. Transparency & trust, 50 out of 100, up to 4.4 more on the total

Made of editorial 46, provenance 54.

Why it scored 50: Server under BSL 1.1 with a grant for production use other than a public Restate platform service, converting to Apache-2.0 four years after each release. That isn't an OSI licence. The SDKs are MIT (20 of 30). The terms cover Restate Cloud but say its use is free of charge, which disagrees with the paid plans on the pricing page. The privacy statement is dated 23 February 2022 and covers the website, the newsletter and early code access, not customer data in Restate Cloud. History retention by plan is on the pricing page, and no DPA could be read (8 of 30). Semantic versioning, an upgrade policy of one minor version at a time with rollback to the previous minor, and an SDK compatibility table, but no deprecation policy with a notice period (10 of 20). Environments run in a US or an EU region. The privacy statement names Cloudflare and Matomo, a status page incident names WorkOS, and the trust centre at trust.restate.dev didn't load in our reader, so no subprocessor list was read (8 of 20).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-transparency):

- 0 to 30, source availability and licence clarity. 30 for open source under an OSI licence, 15 for closed with clear terms, 0 for unclear terms.
- 0 to 30, data handling and retention statements that agree with each other (privacy policy, DPA, retention periods, subprocessors).
- 0 to 20, a deprecation policy or notices with dates.
- 0 to 20, telemetry disclosed with an opt-out (local software), or subprocessors and data locations disclosed (hosted).

The other half of Transparency and trust is the provenance score, computed from checked facts (below). The category score is the mean of the two.

Provenance checks not met in full (half of this category, computed from checked facts):

- Domain age: restate.dev, registered 2022-02-11 (4 years) (7 of 15)
- Endpoint on the vendor's domain:  is not on restate.dev (0 of 15)
- Terms of service: published, but our reader couldn't read it (7 of 10)
- Privacy policy: not found (0 of 10)
- security.txt: not found (0 of 10)

## 4. Agent ergonomics, 81 out of 100, up to 3.1 more on the total

Why it scored 81: No MCP server for operating Restate was found, so the surface is the HTTP ingress and Admin API. Resolving an awakeable sends one JSON value and returns almost nothing, and run state is read with SQL through the introspection API, where the caller chooses columns and limits (18 of 25). SQL filters over invocations and state, with no cursor pagination found on the Admin list routes (15 of 20). `x-restate-error-source` separates handler errors from ingress errors, the docs name the retryable status codes, and a rejection can carry an error code (16 of 20). `Idempotency-Key` on calls and sends with 24-hour retention by default, attach and output routes that are safe to retry, and an awakeable that resolves or rejects once. MCP annotations don't apply (17 of 20). `ctx.awakeable()` takes no arguments, and official SDKs cover TypeScript, Python, Java and Kotlin, Go and Rust (15).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-ergonomics):

- 0 to 25, context cost. For MCP, the number and size of the tool definitions (25 for ten or fewer compact tools, 15 for 11 to 30, 5 for more than 30, plus up to 10 back for toolsets, dynamic loading or read-only subsets). For APIs, whether responses can be sized (field selection, limits, summaries).
- 20, pagination, filtering and output-size controls.
- 20, actionable, documented error responses, codes and messages an agent can recover from.
- 20, idempotency or safe retries, and for MCP the `readOnlyHint` and `destructiveHint` annotations.
- 15, sensible defaults, few required parameters, and official SDKs in at least two languages.

Models are read for tool use, structured output, prompt caching, context length, batch and SDKs. Frameworks for how much code and how many defaults a tool-calling agent with MCP needs.

## 5. Schema & documentation, 85 out of 100, up to 2.4 more on the total

Why it scored 85: OpenAPI 3.1 for the Admin API, 28 paths, at docs.restate.dev/schemas/openapi-admin.json, and the server generates an OpenAPI 3.1 definition for each registered service. No published spec was found for the ingress routes that resolve and reject awakeables, which are documented in prose with curl examples (20 of 25). llms.txt, llms-full.txt, a .md copy of every page and a docs MCP server at docs.restate.dev/mcp (10). The external-events page compares signals, awakeables and workflow promises in one table with what each is for, and the approval guide lists the five steps of the pattern (16 of 20). Typed SDKs in five language families, with the awakeable payload typed by the caller and sent as JSON (12 of 15). The approval guide has working code for seven agent SDKs plus timeouts, and there is an error-code reference and the `x-restate-error-source` header (12 of 15). Semantic versioning with dated changelogs for the server and each SDK (15).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-schema):

APIs and MCP servers.

- 25, a machine-readable contract (a public OpenAPI file or similar; for MCP, typed JSON Schema inputs on every tool).
- 10, llms.txt or Markdown docs served for agents.
- 0 to 20, descriptions that say what a tool is for, when to use it and when not to, read from the tool definitions in the source or the API reference.
- 0 to 15, typed inputs with enums, constraints and required fields, and no free-form JSON blobs.
- 0 to 15, examples and documented error responses.
- 15, versioning and a public changelog.

Models are read from the API reference, the OpenAPI file, llms.txt, the structured-output and tool-use docs and the model cards. Frameworks from docs a model can follow, typed interfaces, examples and the API reference.

## 6. Reliability, 91 out of 100, up to 1.8 more on the total

Why it scored 91: Graded as Restate Cloud, the hosted service, with the hosted lines. Status page at status.restate.dev (incident.io) with two components and a 90-day window (20). One incident in the 90 days to 8 October 2026. On 16 July the Cloud UI was down for 36 minutes during a WorkOS outage, and the page says the API, control plane and data plane were unaffected. Cloud Environments shows 100 per cent and Cloud UI 99.98 per cent (25 of 30). Throughput is published per plan, from 10 actions a second with bursts to 100 on Free up to 500 with bursts to 2,000 on Premium (15). The ingress docs say which calls are safe to retry, name 408, 425, 429 and 5xx as retryable, and take an `Idempotency-Key` header. No Retry-After guidance was found (13 of 15). The pricing table lists 99.9 per cent on Starter, Business and Premium and 99.99 per cent on Enterprise, but no SLA document was found and the terms say availability can't be guaranteed (8 of 10). Restate Cloud, awakeables and the server at 1.7 are generally available (10).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-reliability):

Hosted APIs, MCP servers, models and platforms.

- 20, a public status page with component history (Statuspage, Instatus, BetterStack or the vendor's own).
- 0 to 30, the incident record for the last 90 days on that page. 30 for a clean record or trivial incidents only, 20 for minor incidents only, 10 for one major outage (an hour or more of a core API down, or errors across the board), 0 for several. 5 when there's no history we could read, and the note says so.
- 15, rate limits documented with numbers.
- 15, documented 429 or overload handling (Retry-After, backoff guidance), and idempotency keys or safe-retry guidance where writes are involved.
- 10, an SLA published for any paid tier.
- 10, the surface agents use is generally available, not beta or preview.

Local packages, SDKs, frameworks and stdio MCP servers.

- 20, installs from an official package with supported runtimes stated.
- 25, a public CI and test suite, passing on the default branch.
- 0 to 25, open crash or regression issues relative to activity (25 for few and handled, 0 for many, old and unanswered).
- 15, semver discipline and breaking changes called out in a changelog.
- 15, version 1.0 or later, or declared stable.

Protocols are read from their reference implementations, the public facilitators or servers, spec stability and test vectors.

## 7. Maintenance & community, 92 out of 100, up to 0.7 more on the total

Why it scored 92: Server v1.7.13 tagged on 1 October 2026 and v1.8.0-rc.1 on 2 October (30). The server changelog has ten releases from v1.7.3 on 7 August to v1.7.12 on 22 September, and the TypeScript SDK reached 1.17.2 on 21 September (20). The server repository has 352 open issues and 105 open pull requests. Of eight issues opened from 2 to 8 October, three were closed within three days and two more had replies (18 of 25). Current official SDKs for TypeScript, Python (1.0.5, 2 September), Java and Kotlin, Go and Rust (15). CI, end-to-end and SDK integration checks passed on the latest main commit we read, with one cancelled run (9 of 10).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-maintenance):

- 0 to 30, time since the last release, or the last published model or API change for a closed service. 30 within 30 days, 20 within 90, 10 within 180, 0 older.
- 20, at least three releases or dated changelog entries in the last 90 days.
- 0 to 25, responsiveness. Issues and pull requests answered on GitHub (the open issues and how recent the replies are). For closed services, a public changelog and a support or community channel that answers, 0 to 15.
- 15, presence in the official MCP registry under a verified namespace (MCP servers), or current official SDKs (APIs and models).
- 10, package health, current dependencies and CI.

Models are read for deprecation notice periods and model churn rather than release counts.

## What we couldn't check

What we couldn't read counted as absent. Publishing it on a page a plain HTTP fetch can read (not only in a browser) lets the next check count it.

- unchecked: the trust centre at trust.restate.dev (Vanta) needs JavaScript and didn't load, so certifications, the subprocessor list and any DPA there weren't read. The SOC 2 Type I statement comes from the BYOC docs.
- unchecked: the full list of API key roles and whether keys can be revoked or rotated, which sit behind the Cloud login. The docs show Full and Admin.
- No privacy policy covering customer data in Restate Cloud was found. The only privacy statement is dated 23 February 2022 and covers the website, so `provenance.privacy` is left out.
- The terms say the use of Restate Cloud is free of charge while the pricing page lists plans from $75 a month. Whether paid customers sign a different agreement is not stated.
- No SLA document was found behind the 99.9 per cent figure on the pricing table.
- The Restate Cloud page says the free plan has 50,000 actions a month and the pricing page says 100,000. We used the pricing page.
- Whether a published spec covers the ingress routes for awakeables. None was found.

## Weaknesses

- No reviewer inbox, Slack app or email. The approval request and the reply endpoint are the builder's code
- Signals can't be resolved over HTTP yet, only from another handler (open issue of 5 October 2026)
- Self-hosted ingress and admin ports have no authentication, so the awakeable ID alone resolves a wait there
- The terms say Restate Cloud is free of charge and the privacy statement of 23 February 2022 covers only the website
- Server under BSL 1.1, which isn't an OSI licence, with no security.txt or SECURITY.md found

## What costs an agent a turn today

The notes we give agents before they call it. Each one is a workaround an agent shouldn't need.

- Create the awakeable, send its ID inside `ctx.run`, then await the promise, so a retry doesn't send a second approval request
- Resolve with `POST /restate/awakeables/<id>/resolve` and a JSON body, or `/reject` with a text reason, which throws a terminal error in the handler
- On Restate Cloud send `Authorization: Bearer key_...` to `https://<env_id>.env.<region>.restate.cloud:8080`. On a self-hosted server put an authenticating proxy in front of port 8080
- Wrap the wait in `orTimeout` and decide what a timeout means. Without it the handler waits with no limit
- Retry ingress errors only on 408, 425, 429 or 5xx, and only when `x-restate-error-source` isn't `invocation`

## When it's done

Send what changed and where it's published as a dispute (https://www.anchorterminal.com/builders/#disputes, or `POST https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/contact` with `"kind": "dispute"`). Disputes are answered in public, and the listing is checked again by the same checklist. Paying for an audit or a listing claim changes nothing here.