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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

#131

Post by wpapper »

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.

I’m a PM on the team that is building this. We want to offer a range of options, from charging everyone to charging unverified bots to simply charging users who exceed rate limits. We don’t want to add a dependency on a particular detection mechanism, but we do want to offer a variety of choices depending on how people want to filter.

Feel free to email me at (my username)@(my company) with feature requests or feedback!

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

#132

Post by wpapper »

luhn wrote: post #28

The focus of this seems to be entirely AI agents, but I wonder if there's a future where browsers implement this and us humans can finally get micropayments in the web. It's been tried unsuccessfully many times but always falls prey to the chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe the AI hype will finally give it the push it needs for widespread deployment.

Yes! I’m a PM on the team that is building this. We want this to work equally well for human payments or agent payments. Low friction micropayments are the problem to solve, but once solved, it can work for either segment.

Feel free to email me at (my username)@(my company) with ideas or suggestions here!

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

#133

Post by johndough »

wpapper wrote: post #129
arjie wrote: post #121

This is the dream of microtransactions and agents-paying-for-access that so many people have always wanted. It was never going to be implemented on existing payment rails so it would have to be something like this. I can't wait to see it in play somewhere because I am increasingly annoyed that I have to own API keys on various platforms etc. etc. I just want my agent to make decisions and spend a limited amount of mo…

Thank you for the kind words! I’m a PM on the team that is building this. I’ve believed in microtransactions for over a decade and hope that we can finally bring them to life. Proper spend delegation and permissions is a big focus of ours - it’s great to let your agent have discretion, as long as the damage from going off course is limited. Definitely want people to feel comfortable experimenting with emerging tech F…

Do you have any plans on mitigating the privacy consequences of microtransactions? I'm fine with paying for (some) content, but I'd prefer if there weren't some companies using that information to manipulate me or the more impressionable members of our society.

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

#134

Post by wmf »

cphoover wrote: post #111

This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly d…

The problem is that AI has made it increasingly difficult to tell bot from human.

Presumably Cloudflare's answer to this is CAPTCHAs.

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

#135

Post by wmf »

_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…

You figured out for yourself why credit cards won't be used. That's why they're pushing stablecoins with no refunds.

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

#136

Post by wmf »

azeemba wrote: post #115
mxuribe wrote: post #114

So, the snake oil salesman in me immediately wonders if this will become the new landscape for spam....It might go something like the following... 1. Establish domain names and relevant cloudflare account including the monetization gateway (associated rules, etc.). 2. Then host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics...not even decent quality...merely a step above old school style SEO keywords...just enou…

Crawler, AI or not, cannot afford to pay per visit. The entire model of crawling works because the incremental cost of each crawl is so low. Even fractions of a penny would be prohibitive.

If you're paying per token for AI, you can also pay a smaller amount to use the Web.

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

#137

Post by wmf »

brody_hamer wrote: post #83

I’m curious about the decision to “aim for sub second transaction times”, rather than using something cryptography-based, such as a verifiable oblivious pseudorandom function. That is, - as a client I could obtain a bunch of credits/tokens from my payment processor - these tokens have the cryptographic property of being verifiable (ex: “that’s definitely a stripe-verified token worth $0.001”) - these tokens also have…

There's no proof of work to begin with.
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