Open payment rails for AI agents

Pay any API in USDC.

One line of code. Open source. Self-host or hosted. Built on the x402 standard.

MIT-licensed gateway Multi-chain by default No vendor lock-in
Run
$ curl https://api.openusdc.ai/v1/echo \    -H "Accept: text/x-402-payment" \    -d '{"prompt":"hello"}' 402 Payment RequiredX-USDC-Amount: 0.0042X-USDC-Chain: baseX-USDC-PayTo: 0xA1f3…7C2d ✓ Settled in 1.2s · receipt: ousdc_3f9a…
Connected · base-mainnetx402 · openusdc-gateway 0.6.2
Built on the x402 payment standard
Helix LabsQuantelNorthstar PayLoop ProtocolAtlas MeshAperture
Used by teams shipping agents on Base Solana Arbitrum Optimism
Use cases

The things your agents can buy when money is an API call.

A short list of what agents already do in production with OpenUSDC. Bring your own use case — the gateway doesn't care what the resource is, only that it's priced.

Call a paid LLM API

Your agent hits a metered inference endpoint and pays per token, with no API key issued in advance.

> agent.call("gpt-omni://summarize", { text })

Scrape rate-limited data

Pay 0.001 USDC per request to a content publisher's x402 endpoint and skip the captcha gauntlet entirely.

> fetch("nyt://article/2026/05/12", { pay: true })

Pay another agent

Agent-to-agent settlement with cryptographic receipts. No invoices, no chargebacks, no Stripe Connect.

> agent.pay("agent://research.bot", "0.10 USDC")

Buy a domain

Your shopping agent purchases the .com it just brainstormed for you, settles in stablecoin, hands you the keys.

> agent.buy("opencharm.ai", "12.00 USDC")

Settle a freelance job

Milestone-based payouts to a contractor agent fronting a human worker, with on-chain receipts both sides can audit.

> milestones.release(taskId, "240.00 USDC")

Tip a creator

Build agents that tip humans (or other agents) for useful work — a podcast, a dataset, a bug report.

> agent.tip("creator://@maia", "1.00 USDC")
The new agent stack

What you stop building when payments are a protocol.

Agents shouldn't carry static API keys, fill in sign-up forms, or wait on Net-30 invoicing to be useful. Move the floor.

Old way
With OpenUSDC
Sign-up forms
USDC wallet address
API keys per service
One x402 endpoint
Stripe + KYC for agents
Open, permissionless rails
Net-30 invoicing
Instant on-chain settlement
Per-vendor billing portals
One reconciled ledger
Hardcoded rate limits
Pay-per-call pricing
How it works

Three steps from idea to first settled payment.

01

Drop in the gateway

One line of middleware turns any HTTP endpoint into a metered, USDC-priced resource. Express, Fastify, FastAPI, Go, Rust — all native.

$ app.use(openusdc.gateway({ price: "0.001 USDC" }))
02

Agents pay automatically

When the agent sees a 402, the SDK signs a payment, retries, and includes a receipt. Your code never sees the wallet plumbing.

$ const data = await openusdc.fetch(url)
03

Reconcile in the dashboard

Every settlement is mirrored into OpenUSDC Cloud with full traceability, exportable CSV, and webhook fanout to your data warehouse.

$ curl https://api.openusdc.ai/v1/payments?since=24h
For developers

Give your agent a wallet, not an API key drawer.

  • Drop-in middleware for Node, Python, Go, Rust, Deno, and Cloudflare Workers
  • Policy-bound agent wallets with spend caps, allow-lists, and revocation
  • Signed payment receipts and idempotency keys on every settlement
  • Local sandbox with deterministic chain simulator for tests
For API providers

Charge per request. Skip the sign-up flow.

  • One line of middleware to start accepting USDC on any HTTP route
  • Dynamic per-route pricing — flat, tiered, or function-of-payload
  • Reconciliation, alerts, and CSV/Parquet exports out of the box
  • Custom JWT claims forwarded from the payment receipt into your handler
Pricing

Free to self-host. Pay for the parts you use.

The gateway is and always will be MIT-licensed. Cloud pricing scales with reconciled payments — not seats, not API requests.

Open Source

Self-host the gateway forever, on any infra.

Free

  • MIT-licensed core
  • All chains, all SDKs
  • Community support
Popular

Cloud Starter

Hosted dashboard, webhooks, reconciliation, alerts.

$49 / mo

  • 10,000 reconciled payments / mo
  • 30-day retention
  • Email support
  • Webhook fanout & retries

Enterprise

For teams operating critical agent infrastructure.

Custom

  • SSO + SCIM
  • Custom retention & residency
  • Uptime SLA, 24/7 on-call
  • Dedicated solutions engineer
FAQ

Questions builders ask.

Don't see yours? Open a thread in our community Discord or email hello@openusdc.ai.

x402 is the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code, originally reserved in the HTTP spec and recently revived as a payment standard by Coinbase and a community of contributors. It lets any server quote a price for a resource and any client (especially an AI agent) pay that price programmatically in seconds, without API keys or contracts. OpenUSDC is the open-source reference gateway and SDK suite for x402 over USDC.

Give your agents money.

The gateway is open. The cloud is hosted. The first 10,000 payments are on us.