Proliferation of agents and machine payments

Today, most software businesses sell their products through subscriptions or prepaid credits. These business models require buyers to make a considerable upfront economic investment, so buyers limit themselves to a few subscriptions that fit into their budget. But this business model doesn’t align itself with how the predominant source of traffic on the Internet — agents — operates.

Agents seek outcomes, whether that’s sourced from a direct question or an implicit elicitation. To achieve an outcome, an agent may visit new sites, call MCP tools, or ingest data feeds. Businesses everywhere want to be in the critical path to help agents get better results. This helps them meet new users where they are, get paid for their inputs to those agents' answers, and take a leading position in headless agentic commerce.

Companies need to align their business models with the consumption patterns of agents to capture this opportunity. Payments must match an agent's consumption unit: per request, per search query, per token. The popular payment rails of today are unable to support this. These payment rails assume that the buyer will accept high latency, will only transact in large dollar values, and that they are a well-known, or identifiable, entity to the seller. Agents desire the opposite: cheap, fast, and reliable payment rails that can safely scale with minimal human intervention.

Sellers and buyers will be incentivized to align their business models with consumption, and they’ll use the payment network that helps them achieve that. Today, stablecoin transactions, and their underlying blockchain networks, are able to support these requirements. Over time, we may see existing networks introduce solutions or new payment networks come online. The Monetization Gateway exists to help ensure that sellers can focus on their product, and buyers can receive a predictable buying experience.

Building with the Monetization Gateway

The Monetization Gateway lets sellers charge agents for any resource behind Cloudflare’s network, priced per use. It's built for resources where every request is the use, like APIs, tools, and data. High-value content is different: a page might be crawled once and used a thousand times. For that, Pay Per Use offers a trusted network of verified buyers who report each use and pay for it.

The gateway uses the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code so buyers can offer payment for a resource over HTTP, inline with the request for the resource itself. This is an important distinction because there is no redirect to a checkout page and no separate payment API to call.

Sellers define which requests require payment, the cost, and where the payment should be sent. Buyers receive the payment instructions, sign an authorization, and receive the resource after the payment has been settled.

In its simplest form, this can be thought of as a ‘paywall for agents’. Sellers can go live in seconds with a few clicks, identify the audience they want to charge, and ensure that buyers are unable to access the resources until the buyer has paid.

Beyond its ease of implementation, we provide sellers a set of pricing and monetization capabilities out of the box. You write pricing rules that match any part of a request, such as the URL, headers, or query parameters, and choose from several pricing schemes. We handle the rest: payment verification and settlement through Coinbase's x402 Facilitator, failures and retries, analytics, and keeping up with changes to the x402 protocol. Payments settle on the Base blockchain using USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. Over time, we plan to help sellers make their services discoverable to agents, expose logs for all transactions, support additional payment rails, and incorporate identity primitives.

Let’s look at how our customers are using it in production today.

Cloudflare AI Gateway: pay for inference

Cloudflare’s AI Gateway is a control plane and model marketplace that allows developers to access hundreds of AI models with a single API key. Our goal is to operate the richest model catalog in the ecosystem and get it in the hands of as many customers as possible. AI Gateway allows customers to purchase credits that can be used toward all AI Gateway consumption. But as more agents carry wallets, maintaining a credit balance as the only usage mechanism adds unnecessary friction.

Starting today, U.S.-based Cloudflare customers can pay for inference at request time to a select set of models by adding the header PAYMENT-METHOD: x402. Detailed instructions are in our AI Gateway Developer Docs. Over time, you can expect to see the HTTP 402 status code embedded natively through more of Cloudflare’s infrastructure products.

$ curl -iX POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID/ai/run" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN" \
  --header "Payment-Method: x402" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "model": "z-ai/glm-4.7-flash",
    "input": {
      "max_tokens": 9001,
      "messages": [
        {
          "role": "user",
          "content": "What is Cloudflare?"
        }
      ]
    }
  }'

AI Gateway has a complex pricing engine powering how each token gets billed. We’ve co-designed Monetization Gateway to meet the requirements of origin-controlled pricing. When this configuration is enabled, the Monetization Gateway requests pricing information directly from the seller (AI Gateway). For AI Gateway, this means being able to rely on its existing pricing module without having to maintain a rules catalog in the Monetization Gateway.

Need to set prices from your origin? Email us and we'll help you get started.

Ceramic.ai: pay for web search

"The web was built for a human buyer, someone who signs up and enters a card. Agents need to act on their own behalf, and payments are how they do it. Search is one of the first things every agent needs, so it should be one of the first things an agent can buy." — Dr. Anna Patterson, Founder, Ceramic.ai

If inference is the reasoning, search is the reality check. Ceramic.ai provides a web search API built for agents. Ceramic.ai maintains a proprietary index of more than 40 billion pages and has optimized every layer of its stack for machine callers, returning search results in as little as 50 milliseconds. At that speed, an agent can search repeatedly throughout a task.

That makes search a natural fit for agent-native payments. Search is one of the most elastic things an agent buys. A simple question might take one query, while a complex research task might take hundreds. When an agent can pay for search itself, it no longer has to ration queries against a budget someone set in advance. It can decide how hard to look based on the task, spending more when the stakes call for more evidence.

Ceramic.ai uses the Monetization Gateway’s fixed pricing monetization scheme to allow agents to pay to execute a search without an API key. Use the demo and Ceramic.ai docs to learn more.

Stocktwits: pay for stock signals

“Agents change the way data gets consumed. Instead of a customer signing up for a subscription or negotiating an enterprise license, an agent can ask for exactly what it needs, when it needs it. The ability to charge for that individual request opens up a completely new way for Stocktwits to make its data available.” - Howard Lindzon, Founder and CEO, Stocktwits

When a stock starts moving, one of the first questions traders ask is: what is everyone else saying?

For 18 years, that conversation has been happening on Stocktwits. Launched in 2008, Stocktwits pioneered cashtags (like $NET) to organize market conversations around individual stocks. Today, more than 10 million people use Stocktwits to follow markets, share ideas, and see what other investors are talking about.

Because Stocktwits is built specifically for investors, it provides a real-time view into what retail investors are watching and discussing. Stocktwits turns that activity into signals including:

• Sentiment: whether recent posts about a ticker are predominantly bullish or bearish
• Message volume: how much conversation a ticker is generating relative to its typical activity
• Followers: how many Stocktwits users follow a ticker, providing a measure of sustained retail interest
• Trending: which tickers are gaining attention fastest

These signals have long been available through Stocktwits' existing data products. The Monetization Gateway creates an additional distribution channel for a new type of customer: AI agents that need market context on demand. For example, an agent monitoring a portfolio or researching an investment might check whether conversation around $NET is taking off, whether sentiment is skewing bullish or bearish, or how many investors follow the ticker. Instead of requiring a traditional data license, a developer can pay for the individual requests their agent actually makes.

To start, Stocktwits built a separate, agent-facing path for these requests, with Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway sitting in front of it. Its existing API and enterprise data products remain unchanged. Each request is priced individually, giving Stocktwits a way to make its market signals accessible to AI agents while preserving its existing data products and licensing models. Get started with their docs today.

API2PDF: pay for API access

API2PDF is a REST API that helps developers generate PDFs from HTML and Office documents. Since launching in 2018, API2PDF has seen a growing number of AI agents directing developers to its service and now treats them as a first-class customer.

API2PDF’s consumption-based pricing model charges customers for the bandwidth and compute required to fulfill each request. Previously, customers needed to create an account and obtain an API key before using the service. After the first month, they needed to supply a credit card, which resulted in a >50% drop off in conversion. API2PDF now uses the Monetization Gateway to return an HTTP 402 response when a user or agent makes a request without an API key. Because each request depends on variable compute and bandwidth costs, API2PDF uses variable pricing to inform agents of the maximum price a single request could cost. Once the client completes the payment, API2PDF fulfills the request and settles only the actual consumption.

Agents face the same build-versus-buy decision developers do. An agent that needs a PDF could burn tokens to generate one itself, or it could pay a specialized API like API2PDF a fraction of a cent to do it properly.

$ curl -iX POST https://v2.api2pdf.com/chrome/pdf/html --header "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{"html":"<p>Hello from an AI agent</p>"}'

HTTP/2 402
content-type: application/json
payment-required: eyJ4NDAy...

Get started today

The Monetization Gateway is available in closed beta to eligible U.S.-based sellers and buyers, with support for new geographies on the way. If you are interested in making your product agent-native, we want to hear from you. Fill out the onboarding application in the Cloudflare Dashboard, check out our Developer Docs, and we’ll get back to you shortly. If you have questions, ideas, or want to help us scale agentic payments, please send us an email.

We’d like to thank our partners for their contributions and feedback. Without them, this launch wouldn’t be possible. This includes Vail Gold and Jeff Rafter from Cloudflare AI Gateway; Dr. Anna Patterson, Sean Costello, Sadé Ried, and Autumn Yuan from Ceramic.ai; Leo Gorkin, Ethan Berk, and Santiago Sanchez from Stocktwits; and Zack Schwartz from API2PDF.

Related tags

AIAI BotsBirthday WeekBotsPaymentsx402

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