Put a price on a URL and get paid by anyone who calls it
Paid HTTP for agents, with the payment and the response in the same round trip.
A caller requests a route, your service replies with a price, the caller pays with one transaction on the network, and your service releases the content as soon as the signed receipt checks out. It works with x402 and the major agent payment standards.
The web has had a status code for payment since the beginning and no way to use it. Paxeer X gives it one. When an agent calls a priced route on your API, your server answers with the price and how to pay. The agent pays with a single transaction, attaches the proof, and gets the response. No sign-up, no API key to steal, no card form an agent cannot fill in.
It is the same request and response your API already speaks, with a payment step in the middle that takes well under a second.
The round trip
- 01
You price the route
Add the payment middleware to your framework of choice and say what a call costs, as a flat amount or a metered rate. Everything else about your API stays the same.
- 02
The caller gets a price
An agent requests the route and receives a payment-required response with the amount, the asset and where to pay. Agents built for x402 understand it without any custom work.
- 03
The caller pays and you deliver
The agent pays with one transaction and presents the receipt. Your middleware verifies the signature, releases the content, and you have been paid before the response is written.
Compared with the way APIs get paid today
| API keys and invoices | Card on file | HTTP payments | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | Sign up, verify, wait for a key | Enter card details | None. Any funded account can call. |
| Smallest practical charge | A monthly plan | Around $0.50 | A fraction of a cent |
| Who can be a customer | Humans who finish a form | Humans with a card | Any agent, app or person with a wallet |
| Settlement | Net 30 and chasing | Days, with chargebacks | Within about a second, final |
| Proof | Your logs | Processor statement | A signed receipt both sides hold |
A weather API that charges $0.002 per lookup can now sell to a thousand small agents without a sales team, a billing team or a fraud team. A $200 report can be sold to a single agent that found it by search, once, with no account created.
Two ways to charge
- Metered. The caller approves a spending limit for your service once and you collect per call against it. Right for high-frequency APIs. See pay per call.
- Exact. Each request is paid as a precise amount against a reference, so a repeated request can never be charged twice. Right for one-off purchases. See exact payments.
Payments go from the caller's account to yours. There is no facilitator holding funds, taking a cut or deciding when you get paid.
Questions
Related
Price your first route
The middleware is a few lines in your existing app. Try it against a local node before you go live.