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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

#181

Post by csomar »

incompatible wrote: post #166
cedws wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely this has the potential to unlock the internet. How often have you clicked a paywalled link on HN and moved on because you don't want to go through the hassle and pay $20 to read an article? If you could be frictionlessly billed 10c to read the article instead, wouldn't you be more willing? I'm actually OK with paying a fair price for the content I consume, I just don't want to be paying hundreds of subscri…

Presumably, nobody would offer the 10c per page unless they were making more than the $20 / month or whatever previously. So people will be paying more. Then add all the sites that currently just get what they can with advertising, and now they can become pay-per-view.

The $20/month model is exclusionary as you are excluding people who are not interested in regularly reading a single newspaper. Pay-per-page is more reasonable. I have rarely paid for news subscription (partly because I find news here which comes from many sources). Obviously, I am not going to pay hundreds in subscriptions, so I am essentially paying $0.

With this, I can see myself paying $20-30/month (less than my coffee spend). That's money that was previously unlocked. Also, being able to pay some random writer/journalist outside the mega-news-corps, has a special feel to it and this gives me the option to do that.

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

#182

Post by mdig »

mixedbit wrote: post #67

With payments the complexity is not only in accepting a payment, but largely in doing so legally. Someone makes a request to my company's paid service, I return 402 and get a stable coin back. Who do I invoice for this revenue? What value added tax do I apply to the invoice? If someone makes 10k paid requests within one month, do I have means of generating one invoice for them for all the usage, or is every request t…

I definitely wouldn't want to implicitly join an economic nexus by virtue of such a payment solicitation. The last thing I want is being subject to EU DSA and limitless other nonsensical legislation.

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

#183

Post by gpm »

colesantiago wrote: post #159
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were providing free services decades ago. Hosting a website, or a Minecraft server, or a VOIP server, or IRC, or a forum simply doesn't cost that much. Well within "some guy's hobby budget" type expenses.

> We were providing free services decades ago. That was then. Now VPS providers are significantly increasing prices (Due to memory shortage) making it unaffordable to run servers cheaply.

Servers, and memory, are orders of magnitude cheaper today than they were decades ago... for memory see: https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html

Yes there's a slight upwards blip right now, but not even close to cancelling decades of progress in price reduction.

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

#184

Post by thinkloop »

sanswork wrote: post #179
skybrian wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't getting the $20 / month from users who bounce off. Seems more likely that subscriptions, advertising, and microtransactions will coexist.

They have to get almost 200 more conversions to make up for the single subscriber. Given a lot of these services offer $1 entry subscriptions and people still bounce it's unlikely you'll have a mass market excited to pay $0.10 everytime they want to read an article to make up for the person paying $20 to read a handful everyday. Microtransactions have existed in a bunch of forms over the past 20 years and always fail…

A $1 entry subscription where you have to type your name and credit card and submit and wait and now you have a relationship to manage, is infinitely more expensive than a 10 cent, automatic, non-recurring, one-time, no cancelation needed, pseudonomous, microtransaction.

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

#185

Post by VladVladikoff »

Bender wrote: post #119
gonight wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had to build a system to drop inbound traffic originating from cloudflare ASNs to prevent bad actors using WARP proxies, no legitimate cloudflare traffic usecases for anything inbound. Getting increasingly sick of cloudflare.

I do something similar seems to get the job done. for BadActor in $(curl -A Mozilla "https://api.cloudflare.com/local-ip-ranges.csv"|grep -Ev "::|/32"|awk -F "," '{print $1}'|sort | uniq); do ip route add blackhole "${BadActor}" 2>/dev/null;done Something similar can be done with AWS EC2 https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

Fun command chain thanks

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

#186

Post by yellow_postit »

skybrian wrote: post #175
hightrix wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue a nightmare for most. Turning everything into a microtransaction / subscription is destroying what was good about the internet.

Depends what you compare it to. If the alternative is buying a subscription to get past a paywall, it might be better?

Ads, especially personalized ads, are the alternative that powers much of the open internet.

More options are great.

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

#187

Post by mx7zysuj4xew »

cedws wrote: post #164
incompatible wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dream for some, a nightmare for others. People locked out from much of the Internet because they don't have enough money. Of course, the prices would usually be set at whatever maximises revenue, just check out scientific journal publishing.

Conversely this has the potential to unlock the internet. How often have you clicked a paywalled link on HN and moved on because you don't want to go through the hassle and pay $20 to read an article? If you could be frictionlessly billed 10c to read the article instead, wouldn't you be more willing? I'm actually OK with paying a fair price for the content I consume, I just don't want to be paying hundreds of subscri…

Nope, not going to happen. Any per use micro transaction isn't going to work. If anything it's going to require a huge amount of workarounds to get the content for free via alternative means

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

#188

Post by mx7zysuj4xew »

IgorPartola wrote: post #158
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…

Options: 1. Any cost of browsing an e-commerce site is taken off the next purchase, whenever it happens. 2. Give each user 100 free page viewed per day or some such before you charge. 3. You don’t actually have to charge users for browsing the site if you provide a free or cheap API allowing bots to search and index your entire catalog. Agents and bots would certainly rather parse a kilobyte of JSON than 20 megabytes…

You just described my own personal vision of hell

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

#189

Post by mx7zysuj4xew »

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.

As it should be. Bots are still user agents much like browsers

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

#190

Post by mx7zysuj4xew »

wpapper wrote: post #132
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!

Never going to happen, and what you're building is worse than any net neutrality fears we had in the past. Except instead of Comcast we now need to fight against Cloudflare
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