x402-micro-tollgate

Visa for AI agents that can’t hold a card

A second-scale settlement bridge for agent traffic — the Web3 tollbooth that clears USDC micropayments and takes 0.1%.

Trusted clearing via Coinbase CDP on Base. You keep the API; agents pay per call in USDC — no card rails, no monthly seat licenses.

See how it works Try the demo Docs on GitHub

The problem

Millions of AI agents will call paid APIs. They don’t have credit cards or SaaS seats. Merchants still need a way to charge per call — without building a billing console or locking revenue behind monthly plans.

How it works

Three steps. Business words only.

01 · Price tag

Show the price

An agent hits your API and gets HTTP 402 — not a hard deny, a machine-readable price tag for the call.

02 · Pay

Settle in seconds

The agent pays a tiny USDC amount. Clearing runs on trusted Coinbase CDP rails — second-scale, not overnight batch.

03 · Unlock

Deliver the goods

The tollgate unlocks and proxies to your upstream. Same loop for HTTP APIs and MCP tools in Cursor / Claude.

How money works

0.1% toll

Like Visa interchange for agent traffic: you keep ~99.9% of every settled call; the protocol takes 0.1%. Self-host is free (MIT) — monetization is the take rate, not a hosted SaaS plan.

Who it’s for

API sellers

Turn any upstream into pay-per-call for agents. Humans can still use a free path; agents convert at the tollbooth.

Tool builders

Ship paid MCP tools agents can discover and call. npm one-liner to run; drop into Cursor when you’re ready.

Try the demo (self-host)

MIT open source. One process: HTTP tollgate + MCP. Point it at your API and open the gate.

npx x402-micro-tollgate
# or
docker compose up

For live settlement set CDP_API_KEY_ID, CDP_API_KEY_SECRET, and X402_PAY_TO. Optional: UPSTREAM_URL, PRICE.

Agents: free yellow pages at /x402/discover (no 402) — merchants from JSON config, not an on-chain registry.

Cursor config

After you expose the server (local or public), paste this into mcp.json.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "x402-micro-tollgate": {
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8402/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Contact

Self-hosted drop-in — no hosted SaaS waitlist. Questions about running your own tollbooth?

What this is not

Not a full agent marketplace. Not a SaaS billing console. Not a custom chain. A thin Visa-style tollbooth: price tag → pay → unlock, cleared through Coinbase CDP.