Cloudflare has introduced its Monetization Gateway in closed beta, allowing businesses to charge AI agents for digital resources based on actual consumption. By using the HTTP 402 status code, the tool enables agents to discover prices and settle payments directly within the request flow, removing the friction of traditional subscriptions or account-based models.
As AI agents increasingly browse websites, call APIs, use tools and consume data on behalf of users, traditional subscription and account-based payment models can create friction for both businesses and machines. Cloudflare Monetization Gateway is designed to enable an agent-native model in which agents can discover the price of a resource, make a payment and access it directly within the HTTP request flow.
The new capability allows domain owners to put usage-based pricing behind resources including websites, APIs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools and datasets, without having to build their own payment infrastructure.
Enabling an agent-first Internet economy
AI agents are changing how digital resources are consumed. Rather than maintaining accounts, subscriptions or prepaid balances across hundreds of services, agents may need to make individual purchases based on the task they are performing, whether that means conducting a web search, accessing market data, calling an API or purchasing AI inference.
Cloudflare Monetization Gateway is designed around this consumption model, allowing sellers to define which requests require payment, determine pricing and control where payments are sent.
The Gateway uses the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code, allowing payment instructions to be returned directly as part of an HTTP request rather than redirecting users or agents to a separate checkout experience. Once payment is authorised and settled, the requested resource can be accessed.
Cloudflare handles payment verification and settlement, failures and retries, analytics and changes to the x402 protocol. Payments currently settle on the Base blockchain using USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.
From AI inference to search and market data
Cloudflare is already using Monetization Gateway in production across several use cases, demonstrating how agent-native payments can support different types of digital services.
Cloudflare AI Gateway: U.S.-based Cloudflare customers can pay for inference at request time for a select set of AI models using x402, providing an alternative to maintaining a prepaid credit balance. AI Gateway can also provide pricing information directly from its existing pricing engine, supporting more complex, origin-controlled pricing.
Ceramic.ai: The web search provider is using Monetization Gateway to allow AI agents to pay for individual search requests without requiring an API key. Ceramic.ai operates a proprietary index of more than 40 billion pages and is designed to deliver search results to machine callers with low latency.
Stocktwits: The financial social network is using Monetization Gateway to make market signals available to AI agents on a per-request basis. Agents can access signals such as market sentiment, message volume, followers and trending tickers without requiring a traditional data licence for every use case.
API2PDF: The PDF-generation API is using Monetization Gateway to allow users and AI agents to access its service without first creating an account and obtaining an API key. Its variable pricing model enables agents to receive a maximum price for a request and pay based on actual consumption.
A new model for digital services
For businesses, the opportunity extends beyond adding another payment method. Monetization Gateway enables organisations to make individual digital resources available to a new class of machine customers while retaining control over pricing and access.
Businesses can create pricing rules based on elements of a request, including URLs, headers and query parameters, and can support different pricing models depending on the resource being accessed.
The approach also removes the need for an agent to establish a prior commercial relationship with every service it wants to use. Instead, payment can become the mechanism through which an agent gains access to a resource.
Building the infrastructure for agentic commerce
Cloudflare sees agent-native payments as part of a broader shift in the way value moves across the Internet.
As AI agents become more capable of acting autonomously, they will increasingly need to purchase resources such as data, APIs, search, inference and specialised tools. Monetization Gateway is designed to provide the infrastructure that allows these transactions to happen as part of the Internet request itself.
Cloudflare plans to expand the Gateway over time with additional payment rails, transaction logs, agent discovery capabilities and identity primitives.
