Cloudflare opens a beta to charge AI agents per request with HTTP 402
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readCloudflare has opened its Monetization Gateway as a closed beta, three months after announcing the plan. The gateway lets domain owners charge AI agents for access to a website, an API, MCP tools or datasets, priced per use. Access is requested from the Cloudflare dashboard.
The company's argument is that subscriptions and prepaid credits do not fit how agents consume. An agent pursuing an outcome may call a new tool or ingest a feed once, so payment has to match its unit of consumption: per request, per search query or per token. Cloudflare says today's popular payment rails assume high latency, large amounts and an identifiable buyer, and that stablecoin transactions currently meet the opposite requirements.
The mechanism is the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. A buyer receives payment instructions in the response, signs an authorisation, and gets the resource once the payment has settled, with no redirect to a checkout page and no separate payment API. Sellers write pricing rules that match any part of a request, such as the URL, headers or query parameters, and choose a pricing scheme. Cloudflare handles verification and settlement through Coinbase's x402 Facilitator, along with retries and analytics. Payments settle on the Base blockchain in USDC.
The gateway is aimed at resources where every request is the use. For content that may be crawled once and used many times, Cloudflare points to a separate programme, Pay Per Use, built on verified buyers that report each use. Planned additions include discoverability for agents, transaction logs, more payment rails and identity features.
Why it matters
HTTP 402 has been reserved in the specification for decades with no common meaning. A large CDN putting it in front of production APIs could turn it into a working convention for machine buyers. For now the only settlement path is a stablecoin on one chain, which sellers will need to weigh before pricing anything.