Cloudflare opens Monetization Gateway beta for agent payments
Cloudflare has opened a closed beta of its Monetization Gateway, which lets site owners charge AI agents for each request using HTTP 402 and settles payments in USDC on Base.
Cloudflare announced that its Monetization Gateway is now in closed beta. The company first described the plan three months ago. Domain owners can use the gateway to charge agents for access to websites, APIs, MCP tools or datasets, and can request access through the Cloudflare Dashboard. Cloudflare said four customer use cases are already in production.
The gateway uses the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. Payment happens inline with the request for the resource, so there is no redirect to a checkout page and no separate payment API to call. Sellers decide which requests require payment, what they cost and where the money goes. Buyers receive payment instructions, sign an authorization, and get the resource once the payment has settled.
Sellers write pricing rules that can match on URL, headers or query parameters, and they can choose from several pricing schemes. Coinbase's x402 Facilitator handles verification and settlement, and payments settle in USDC on the Base blockchain. Cloudflare argues that card-style payment rails assume high latency, large transaction values and buyers whose identity is known, which does not fit agents paying per request, per query or per token.
The gateway is meant for resources where each request counts as one use. For high-value content that may be crawled once and reused many times, Cloudflare points to its separate Pay Per Use offering.
Cloudflare's own AI Gateway is one of the first users. U.S.-based customers can now pay for inference on a select set of models at request time by adding a Payment-Method: x402 header, as an alternative to prepaid credits.
Cloudflare said its future plans include agent discoverability for sellers, transaction logs, additional payment rails and identity primitives. It did not give timelines.