Cloudflare launches Monetization Gateway and Pay Per Use betas for charging AI agents

What launched

Cloudflare has moved two agent-monetization products into beta: the Monetization Gateway, now available as a closed beta, and Pay Per Use, a companion program that pays publishers when AI products actually use their content. According to the Cloudflare blog, the Monetization Gateway was announced as a plan three months ago and now has four customer use cases in production, while Pay Per Use follows a plan Cloudflare outlined in July.

Monetization Gateway: HTTP 402 for agents

The Monetization Gateway lets domain owners charge agents for anything behind Cloudflare's network — websites, APIs, MCP tools or datasets — priced per use. Its central mechanism is the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. A buyer attaches payment to the request itself, so there is no redirect to a checkout page and no separate payment API to call. Sellers define which requests require payment, the cost, and where the money goes; buyers receive the instructions, sign an authorization, and receive the resource once payment settles. Cloudflare describes the result as a paywall for agents that can be switched on in seconds.

Pricing rules can match any part of a request, such as the URL, headers or query parameters. Cloudflare handles payment verification and settlement through Coinbase's x402 Facilitator, along with retries, analytics and protocol updates. Payments settle on the Base blockchain in USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar.

The production users Cloudflare highlights include its own AI Gateway, where US customers can now pay for inference on select models at request time by sending a PAYMENT-METHOD: x402 header instead of pre-buying credits. Search API Ceramic.ai, which maintains an index of more than 40 billion pages and returns results in as little as 50 milliseconds, uses fixed pricing so agents can pay per search without an API key. Stocktwits is using the gateway to let agents request stock signals individually rather than through a subscription or enterprise license.

Pay Per Use: charging for what happens after the crawl

High-value content behaves differently from APIs: a page may be crawled once and used a thousand times. Pay Per Use targets that gap. Each AI company defines the use it will pay for — for example returning an excerpt to a user, or letting a product review shape a shopping recommendation — sets a price, and connects a payment account. Publishers review offers in the Cloudflare dashboard, accept or decline, and keep control over crawler access and downstream uses, including training restrictions. AI companies identify their crawling through Cloudflare's Verified bots.

Buyers then report each use as a single line of JSON. Cloudflare aggregates the reports, bills the buyer, and pays publishers monthly. Usage is self-reported: program terms require complete reporting, and Cloudflare checks that each reported use maps to an enrolled publisher. The model differs from Pay Per Crawl, launched in 2025, which charges for access. Cloudflare argues that charging per crawl forces buyers to pay before they know what they need, and that tying price to actual use should bring more buyers to the table and more revenue to publishers.

Why it matters

Both betas are a wager on an agent-heavy web with different economics. Subscriptions and prepaid credits assume identifiable buyers making large, infrequent payments. Agents, as Cloudflare sees them, need inexpensive, low-latency payments that run reliably without humans in the loop — and Cloudflare argues that mainstream payment rails cannot support this today, while stablecoin transactions on blockchains can.

For publishers, the calculus is equally stark: most will never sign a licensing deal with an AI company, and no company can negotiate with millions of sites. Pay Per Use offers a middle path between blocking every agent and giving work away, with records of what was used and what it earned. The two programs share foundations — identity, metering, pricing and analytics — and Cloudflare says to expect more: agent discoverability, transaction logs, additional payment rails, identity primitives, and richer per-use reporting such as the keywords or the product a citation powered.

The open questions are whether buyers find content worth the price, whether publishers can trust self-reported usage, and whether stablecoin settlement works for sellers — exactly the questions Cloudflare says the beta period is meant to answer.