The 402 standard has been a craze this year with x402 and MPP. It makes any API payable per request — no accounts, no API keys (APIs vs Forward Deployed Engineers). That raises a new question: once agents can pay, how do you price services for them?
A new type of buyer
There are some unique attributes that make agents different from human buyers and their purchasing decisions. They can poll an endpoint with variable pricing endlessly, 24/7. Wait until criteria are met and buy when they want.
One aspect which has moved this needle is that the settlement is instant (The speed of money) with stablecoins. The challenge becomes adapting pricing based on demand because the agent will buy it the moment you drop it below the agent's desired price. What we'll see are agents pricing these endpoints for agents too.
This opens up a range of models available to test for businesses. We'll likely start with flat per call and some metered work (exact vs upto) depending on what the endpoint does, eventually ending up with time- and activity-based pricing.
Pricing does not need to be simple because an agent can consume complex pricing.
New questions in front of us
Just because an agent can pay, does not mean an agent will choose you (Product-fit vs Pricing-fit). We are seeing a lot of sellers emerge in this space selling the same data/resources. There's little differentiation between sellers. This moves the moat to be more around data quality, consistency, uptime, freshness, latency, etc., not just being payable using stablecoins.
Tl;dr
x402 and MPP have removed friction to pay, not the work of pricing. We are seeing existing web2 models being implemented but stablecoins and 402 open up way more. There are new business models to be developed here.