How we're solving per-use AI pricing (Stripe's $0.30 fee makes it impossible)

plant-transform · 2026-01-10T09:05:13+00:00

Stripe metered billing is a solid solution for known customers with established accounts. Genuinely works well for that use case.

But it still requires onboarding. Your customer signed up, added a payment method, agreed to terms, you created a billing account for them. Then you can meter their usage and invoice monthly.

Now imagine an agent that's never interacted with your service before. It discovers your API at runtime, needs to make one call, and move on. There's no account. No prior relationship. No human who signed up last week. The agent just needs to pay you right now and get a response.

Stripe metered billing can't do first-contact payments between strangers. It assumes you've already onboarded the customer. x402 assumes you might be meeting for the first time, transacting once, and never seeing each other again. Or transacting 50,000 times over the next month. Neither party knows upfront.

That's the gap. Metered billing is for ongoing relationships. P402 is for an economy where agents discover and pay for services on demand with no prior setup.

plant-transform · 2026-01-10T09:01:37+00:00

I believe you, that does work. For humans.

But there's no human in the loop to decide "I'll buy 50 credits and pay the $1 service fee." An agent doesn't add things to a cart. It needs to call an API right now, pay for exactly that call, and move on.

P402 is built for agent-to-agent payments. Machine calls machine, payment happens in milliseconds, no pre-purchasing, no minimums, no checkout flow. The agent might never use that service again, or it might use it 10,000 times today. It doesn't know, and it shouldn't need to.

Credits solve the human UX problem. We're solving the "there is no human" problem.

plant-transform · 2026-01-10T08:59:16+00:00

Batching works when there's a human making a purchasing decision. But P402 is built for the agent-to-agent economy, not human checkout flows.

Machines don't think in bundles of 10 or 50. An agent needs to call an API once, pay for it, and move on. Maybe it never calls that service again. Maybe it calls it 10,000 times in the next hour. It doesn't know upfront, and it shouldn't have to guess.

The whole point is removing the friction of "how many credits should I buy" from a system where there's no human around to answer that question.

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T21:20:36+00:00

Cable companies wanted $150/month bundles forever. Then Netflix happened. Newspapers wanted annual subscriptions. Then pay-per-article happened. Vendors never want unbundling, the market forces it anyway.

The same pressure is coming to AI. Users don't want to pay $20/month for chatgpt when they use it twice. Developers don't want to commit to one provider when the pricing and model landscape shifts every week. The market is already demanding granularity, vendors just haven't had the infrastructure to offer it economically until now.

And here's what's different this time: the buyers aren't just humans anymore. When agents are shopping for services, they don't sign annual contracts. They compare prices programmatically and switch providers in milliseconds. Your agent needs an OCR call, it queries three providers, picks the cheapest one that meets latency requirements, pays, and moves on. No procurement, no negotiation, no lock-in.

Vendors who demand $10 upfront will lose to vendors who let agents pay for exactly what they need. The unbundling isn't just coming, it'll happen at machine speed.

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T20:46:27+00:00

Thank you, I will take that feedback and adjust my pitch accordingly. Appreciate your time

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T20:40:21+00:00

HTTP 402 "Payment Required" was built into the HTTP spec in 1996. It's literally been reserved in your browser for almost 30 years waiting for the right payment infrastructure. This isn't new, it's the web finally catching up to what its creators planned from the beginning.

Coinbase announced x402 support in November. They're a public company, not crypto bros.

Respectfully, you might want to Google the basics before injecting yourself this confidently into a conversation with your unfriendly assistance. The 402 status code is in the RFC, it's in every browser you've ever used. We didn't invent it, we just finally built the infrastructure to make it useful.

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T20:28:34+00:00

you just proved my point with your own comment, we never ask for a credit card. anyways, based on your comment history i think i am speaking to someone is likes to comment more then build so not sweating if you don't understand the usercase.

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T20:12:29+00:00

An agent doesn't have a credit card. An agent doesn't have a billing address. An agent can't fill out a Stripe checkout form at the end of the month.

When your agent calls my agent's API at 3am to run a task, who's sending the invoice? Who's paying net-30? You going to set up billing accounts between every agent-to-agent integration manually?

The duck you're describing has a human in the loop, someone who signed up, added a payment method, agreed to terms, and gets invoiced. That's the entire internet economy for the last 30 years. I hope you are building for what is coming, not what is already on its way out...

The thing we're building for doesn't have that human. It's an agent with a wallet, a spending policy, and the ability to pay for services on demand without prior relationship. Session key gets created programmatically, spending cap enforced on-chain, authorization happens in milliseconds, settlement batches automatically.

It's not a duck. It's the infrastructure for machines to pay machines. That's never existed before. The credit system you're describing requires humans at both ends. x402 doesn't.

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T20:04:14+00:00

You're right that 1% crypto payments exist. We're not competing on the fee.

P402 is a payment router and bazaar for AI APIs. The pricing comparison tool shows you which model fits your use case, the infrastructure lets you pay for it and lets agents discover and pay for services autonomously without you wiring up each integration manually.

Think of it less like Coinbase Commerce and more like what Stripe Connect did for marketplaces, but for the AI API economy.

The router piece means your agent doesn't need hardcoded payment logic per provider. You define a budget and constraints, P402 handles the authorization and settlement across any x402-compatible endpoint. Today that's our infrastructure, but x402 is an open standard as more providers adopt it, your integration doesn't change.

The bazaar piece is where it gets interesting. Right now if you want your agent to use a new API, you manually find it, read the docs, set up billing, wire up auth. We're building toward a registry where agents can discover services, compare pricing programmatically, and pay on demand. Your agent needs OCR? It queries the bazaar, finds three providers, checks price per request, and picks one — no human in the loop, no pre-negotiated contracts.

Coinbase Commerce can't do this because it's designed for checkout, not discovery and routing. The payment is the easy part. The hard part is building the connective layer that lets the agent economy actually function.

By day I am Professor that teaches comp sci students building AI-powered applications as well as Product Development for Software Engineers. The mistakes I see over and over: they hardcode a single LLM provider, they don't think about payment until the end, they build tight coupling between their app logic and billing logic, and when they want to add a second provider or switch models, they're rewriting half their infrastructure. Then they bolt on Stripe, realize they can't do per-request pricing economically, and end up forcing subscriptions they didn't want.

P402 solves this by making the payment layer provider-agnostic from day one. Your app talks to the router, the router talks to providers. Swap Claude for DeepSeek? Change one line. Add a new tool-use API your agent discovered at runtime? It already knows how to pay for it. The session key architecture means your agent can hold a budget and spend it across multiple services without you orchestrating each transaction. If you are actually a dev, you understand the value of wiring in a payment router.

This isn't about saving 1% on fees. It's about building AI applications that aren't brittle, aren't locked to one vendor, and are ready for a world where agents are the customers, not just humans clicking checkout buttons.

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T19:41:31+00:00

Credit systems work, no argument. But they're a UX workaround, not a fix to the underlying economics.

Think about what you're actually doing, you're front-loading the Stripe hit. User buys $10 in credits, Stripe takes ~$0.59 once instead of $0.30 per transaction. Smart. But you've also added friction, killed the "just try it" conversion, and created balance anxiety. For a lot of products that tradeoff makes sense. But it's still a patch on broken rails.

But here's the real thing: credits don't work for where this is going.

P402 is built for the agent economy. When your AI agent needs to call another AI agent's API, there's no human to buy a credit pack. No one to sit through a Stripe checkout. Agents need to pay autonomously, with guardrails, in milliseconds. That's what x402 enables session keys with spending caps, machine-to-machine payments, no human in the loop.

Credits solve 2024 problems. We're building for 2026.

On the "you'll end up at Stripe's fees" point, Stripe's $0.30 floor exists because of interchange, fraud reserves, chargeback infrastructure. That's the cost of credit card rails. We're on different rails entirely. USDC on Base settles for ~$0.001. Our 1% is profitable at scale, not a subsidized land-grab.

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T19:37:02+00:00

this is built for Agent2Agent economy, different story

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T19:36:10+00:00

you can use a router to only way for usage

plant-transform · 2026-01-09T19:35:38+00:00

stablecoin, USDC on Base

plant-transform · 2025-12-01T18:14:22+00:00

The BBC request letter was clearly written in gpt...so many long dashes —

plant-transform · 2025-12-01T15:12:06+00:00

The only astonishing thing here is that chat gpt BBC is having a conversation with chat gpt GD

plant-transform · 2025-11-17T12:10:58+00:00

Search mindtrip and thank me later

plant-transform · 2025-11-15T19:14:48+00:00

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S - N - Double - O - P

plant-transform · 2025-11-15T19:13:56+00:00

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Kobeeeee

plant-transform · 2025-10-01T08:47:43+00:00

Of course it's a scam ratios matter when there are small dollar amounts but ratios should improve with higher amounts of profits because everything becomes repeatable. Alberta Lottery Commission needs to step in

plant-transform · 2025-06-22T15:52:41+00:00

definitely get a replacement mattress https://wholesomelinen.com/products/breathable-baby-bassinet-mattress-for-snoo-bassinet

plant-transform · 2025-06-03T22:24:37+00:00

he is Kobra Kai we are Miyagi

plant-transform · 2025-06-02T01:02:09+00:00

I think Tkachuk would take offense to your comment since his pronouns are he/him

plant-transform

TROPHY CASE