Unlocking New Business Models
x402 enables granular monetization strategies that were previously impossible with traditional payment rails.
Pay-Per-Call APIs
Traditional APIs rely on monthly subscriptions. x402 allows charging per individual request, enabling micro-revenues and aligning cost with usage.
A weather API charging $0.001 per forecast request.
Metered Compute & Storage
AI inference and cloud storage can be billed per second or per gigabyte. Customers pay only for what they consume, with instant settlement.
Paying for GPU inference time for an LLM query.
AI Agent Commerce
Empowers AI agents to purchase data or services autonomously. Agents can negotiate and pay without human intervention or credit cards.
A trading bot buying real-time market data feed access.
Pay-Per-Article
Content creators can implement paywalls at the article or paragraph level. Readers pay tiny amounts to access premium content instantly.
Unlocking a single news article for $0.05 instead of a monthly sub.
Deferred Payments for Crawlers
Search engines or crawlers can be charged for accessing large datasets. Cloudflare’s proposed deferred payment scheme illustrates how crawlers could pay in batches at the end of the day, reducing on-chain congestion.