One install and your site answers machines with the web's own
402 Payment Required: agents pay a few cents per page from their wallet,
humans walk through free.
“This site is protected. Please complete the captcha, or if you're an AI, pay the toll fee of $0.02 from your agent wallet.”
The whole negotiation, in one request: 402 → signed payment → 200. No accounts, no invoices, no human involved.
AI agents are reading your site right now, answering questions with your content, summarizing your articles, training on your data. They don't click ads. They don't subscribe. They don't even see your paywall. Today you have two options, and both lose:
Cloudflare-style bot fighting. You get nothing, and the arms race never ends.
They take your content for free, forever.
The agent's owner has already set its spending rules. To the agent, $0.02 is a rounding error; it just pays and moves on. To you, it's a brand-new revenue line.
An AI agent requests a protected page. Your gate answers HTTP 402 Payment Required, the status code the web reserved in 1997 and never used. The toll terms ride in the PAYMENT-REQUIRED header.
The price, the network, the destination: all in the header. The agent signs a payment from its own wallet using x402, the standard backed by Coinbase and Cloudflare, and retries in the same motion.
The payment settles on-chain in seconds, a real receipt per toll, and the content unlocks. No human involved, no accounts, no invoices.
Your dashboard shows every toll as it arrives: which page, which agent, which transaction. Humans meanwhile pass a captcha and never notice any of this.
| / | $0.02 | every article, default | |
| /premium/* | $0.10 | premium data? charge more | |
| /archive/1994/* | $0.25 | the deep cuts |
You set the price. Paid directly to your wallet in stablecoins, per read. Agents that won't pay get blocked, so you keep the protection either way.
The prototype runs today: an agent requested a protected page, read the toll, paid from its own wallet, and the payment settled on-chain. The receipt is public:
The payment rail (x402) is the one Coinbase and Cloudflare are standardizing on. Agent wallets already exist and are already funded. The missing piece is the toll booth on the site owner's side. That's us.
And it monetizes at $0 today. Every month you wait, the free readership grows.
x402 and agent wallets went mainstream in the last year. The money rail exists; the booth didn't.
Cloudflare's "Pay Per Crawl" shows site owners want this, but it targets big crawlers on Cloudflare's network. Agent Tolls is built for the long tail of personal AI agents, on any site.
15-minute setup, free during the pilot. You keep the majority of every toll, and you tell us what to build next.
Become a design partnerWould you install this? Tell us: [email protected]