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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

#91

Post by dgellow »

Animats wrote: post #68

"There is an enormous amount of value moving across the Internet today that goes unmonetized or undermonetized, not because no one would pay for it, but because the tools to charge for it have never existed." Every road a toll road. How big a cut does Cloudflare want? Whose "stablecoin" does this use? How much does each on-chain stablecoin transaction cost?[1] For comparison, FedNow bank to bank transfers cost $0.045…

It’s the same „financialization of everything“ mindset that was being pushed by cryptocurrency people. It’s such a perverse concept, pushing for every interaction on the internet to be a transaction

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

#93

Post by riffraff »

hedora wrote: post #31
the_gipsy wrote: post #23

[flagged]

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…

I play dungeon crawl stone soup (think nethack,but with web tiles), and most of the servers are struggling because of AI crawlers downloading the morgues.

Real users are already suffering.

If (big if) the AI labs can be made to pay for the abuse, actual users win.

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

#94

Post by hedora »

carlosjobim wrote: post #25
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.

Unless you have people's biometric data, you won't be able to separate agents from people. Except by payment.

Agents will be able to pay orders of magnitude more than humans, since they can just cache the documents at openai or anthropic, then use them over and over.

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

#96

Post by happosai »

_pdp_ wrote: post #19

I might be in the minority here, but although x402 sounds useful, it seems to me that adoption will be an uphill struggle, especially for per-request micropayments. The most likely scenario is Stripe, or someone similar, creating an agentic API connected to the agent owner linked account or something along those lines. I am not sure how this would work with 3DS, or whether it would be acceptable at all, since these k…

People are already being conditioned into micropayments via LLm token pricing.

I presume the primary payment method on these 402 sites will be via LLM agents so reading a page via an AI agent will just cost a little more in tokens than the LLM making it all up.

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

#98

Post by penguin_booze »

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.

See also the deranged post from the CEO, gloating about firing employees: https://archive.is/gSrfU.

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

#99

Post by windexh8er »

AviationAtom wrote: post #40
nzeid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think DDoS attacks are really what propelled them to the heights it has. The attacks seem to get bigger and bigger by the year. You need a really big pipe to filter them out on before passing on traffic to servers with a much smaller pipe.

Yes, DDoS was definitely their entry point. I remember recommending them to a friend about a year or so after they had launched with the free tier. He was managing a small school district that was dealing with DDoS issues intermittently. What he needed was just outside of free at the time and I believe Cloudflare was still small enough where he had a call with Mr. Prince.

I was a strong proponent of Cloudflare for years, but looking back should have known better. I felt like others in the space would have tracked along how they went to market but that didn't play out as I would have suspected. I still use Cloudflare for DNS on domains that I use sparingly (mostly just for mail records), but no longer recommend anyone let Cloudflare terminate TLS unless they need it.

It's pretty amazing what you can get for a server host (bare metal) these days at the price point. I don't run any of those behind Cloudflare and haven't had any issues as of yet.

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

#100

Post by carlosjobim »

hedora wrote: post #94
carlosjobim wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have people's biometric data, you won't be able to separate agents from people. Except by payment.

Agents will be able to pay orders of magnitude more than humans, since they can just cache the documents at openai or anthropic, then use them over and over.

But then the cost to access a HTML page will also have to be thousands of dollars, since it can only be sold five times. (Once to Anthropic, once to OpenAI, once to Google, once to Meta and once to Apple).
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