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Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#41

Post by smalltorch »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #13

I am not a fan of the growing trend that Cloudflare is the gatekeeper of the internet. Personally I will never support this company, or firewall any of my websites behind it.

Step one: Make a gate everyone uses

Step two: Sell keys to the gate

Muah ha ha

But in all seriousness I wonder who needs this... api's are suppose to make it easy to bridge two application... and you didn't need AI to utilize an api before so I wonder what's pushing this sort of thing to extract value down to individual calls?

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#42

Post by ygouzerh »

nzeid wrote: post #33
VladVladikoff wrote: post #13

I am not a fan of the growing trend that Cloudflare is the gatekeeper of the internet. Personally I will never support this company, or firewall any of my websites behind it.

I'm old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds here. Everyone just uses Cloudflare, which is not a bad thing by itself. But do they _have_ to? Is managing your own edge really that terrifying?

For non-corporate entities, it is!

Having an almost a plug and play solution who does CDN + DDoS Protection + WAF/Rate Limiter + Bot Protection, for a few bucks, is very useful for startups and SMEs.

And compared to cloud different offerings, their quick setup and lower cost is hard to beat.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#44

Post by AviationAtom »

petcat wrote: post #4

> NEW YORK – MCP Dev Summit North America – April 2, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it is launching the x402 Foundation with the contribution of the x402 protocol from Coinbase. The new Foundation will serve as the neutral home for x402, a universal standard for payments that embeds payments directly into web interactions, enabling…

The intent is to not make companies shoulder the cost of other organizations scraping their content. When it is regular users browsing the cost incurred is trivial. When bots are scraping the entirety of a site, repeatedly, it adds up quickly.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#45

Post by horsawlarway »

I'm going to poke at a downstream consequence here.

Lets say this catches on (in some form or another, whether in this precise implementation or not).

So assume we have a world where resources can be gated by a payment wall that agents can interact with.

I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc).

---

At what point can I sue these companies for obviously failing to act in my interests?

Because that's the clear next step here.

Basically - where is the fiduciary duty that I would require for a real working relationship?

Because otherwise these agents can and will prefer to access payment gated resources that have financial relationships with their operators or developers.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#46

Post by ygouzerh »

bilekas wrote: post #9

Am I understanding this correct in that you can basically automate monetizing your web/api content to everyone or just agents ? Because I would be very much in support of charging agents per request, but I would want to still offer humans a free experience.

Their example of an /api/premium is quite nice! You could you like keep existing pages free, but provide specific output content for llm!

So if: cost monetized API data got by scraping, then some people/business will likely pay

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#47

Post by hungryhobbit »

babelfish wrote: post #39

The upside of using this is that AI shops might pay you for your content. Realistically, they just won't use your content, there is more than enough free (or synthetic) data out there. Not even to mention their contracts with firms like Mercor etc. I guess I don't understand who this is for. If you want your worldview reflected in the latest generations of models, you probably wouldn't use this. If you don't want you…

I think that's a pretty wild statement: there isn't just one type of content!

Twilight fan fiction? Claude probably won't pay for that.

But critical programming documentation that its bots (and their human users) rely on to do their daily job ? You better believe Anthropic will pay for that (instead of letting another AI pay for it, and steal all their customers).

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#48

Post by lurkshark »

babelfish wrote: post #39

The upside of using this is that AI shops might pay you for your content. Realistically, they just won't use your content, there is more than enough free (or synthetic) data out there. Not even to mention their contracts with firms like Mercor etc. I guess I don't understand who this is for. If you want your worldview reflected in the latest generations of models, you probably wouldn't use this. If you don't want you…

I don’t think this is aimed at the labs and pre-training, it’s aimed at end users and their agents. Like if you’re a news site the paying customer isn’t a lab scraping your articles for training, it’s an end user that asked their agent to lookup the news of the day

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#49

Post by ygouzerh »

skybrian wrote: post #38

Micropayments have always suffered from an early adopter problem because it’s difficult to convince ordinary users to pay for web pages. But if a big company, perhaps one of the AI labs, started paying websites using this system then it might bootstrap the system? I think the difficult part is that LLMs are gullible and it will absolutely be gamed if any real money can be made this way. It would be nice if this becam…

An partnership with Perplexity AI would be nice!

Let's say a part of the subscription is used to pay for it.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#50

Post by ryan_n »

axus wrote: post #34
hedora wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize humans are going to be the first wave of collateral damage right? I already basically cannot browse the internet for technical information, since most high-quality forums are behind captchas that block my iPhone. If I ask an agent to do it, it does better at finding the small percentage of sources not hosted by cloudflare. However, it generally cannot hit open-access / public domain sources (like the curr…

Would you be willing for Cloudflare to "Know their customer" (you) and pay 3 cents to access the forum, instead of filling in the captcha?

I thought the goal was to only charge agents a fee, which would either 1. stop agents from scraping your site non-stop and eliminate the need for a captcha, making the human experience better or 2. make the owner of the site some money in exchange for a bajillion bots scraping their content.

Maybe that's too optimistic though based on the responses in this thread.

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