Cloudflare pushed two AI payment products into beta on Sept. 30: a Monetization Gateway that bills AI agents per request, and a separate Pay Per Use program that pays publishers after an AI company reports retrieving their content.

The Gateway charges per call to APIs, MCP tools, datasets, or sites, at prices set by the seller. Pay Per Use flips the model: the AI company names the use case and the price, and publishers decide whether to accept.

Cloudflare announced the Gateway on July 1 and opened a waitlist the same day. The closed beta restricts both sides of every transaction to U.S.-based accounts.

How does the Monetization Gateway work?

The Gateway runs on the x402 protocol and the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code. An agent hitting a protected resource first gets the price, signs a payment authorization, and retries the request. The seller responds only after Cloudflare verifies payment.

Each rule covers four fields:

• Domain and URL
• Price
• Target audience (everyone, or only verified bots on Cloudflare's BotBase)

Fixed pricing locks the cost for identical inputs. Variable pricing sets a maximum cap, and the origin server reports the actual amount owed. Settlements start at $0.001 and run up to $100 per call.

Cloudflare settles in USDC stablecoin on the Base blockchain through Coinbase's x402 Facilitator. The company says it will add more payment methods later.

Who can use the Gateway today?

Both sellers and buyers must sit inside the United States. Sellers also need:

• A credit card on file
• A verified email address
• An account older than 60 days
• A Cloudflare-proxied zone older than 30 days
• A zone that passes Cloudflare's security checks

Sellers request access through the Cloudflare dashboard.

Which implementations are live?

Cloudflare lists four running integrations:

• AI Gateway — Cloudflare's own product, charging per inference across four open models for U.S. users
• Ceramic.ai — a web search API for agents, sold under fixed pay-per-search pricing with no API key
• Stocktwits — a dedicated route that charges per market signal request
• API2PDF — a PDF-generation API on a variable price tied to compute and bandwidth

Cloudflare's post notes that API2PDF saw a drop of more than 50% in conversion after asking customers for a credit card a month in.

How does Pay Per Use differ from the Gateway?

The two programs sit at opposite ends of the transaction. Pay Per Crawl charges for access. Pay Per Use pays for what happens after access, such as a cited answer in AI search.

Cloudflare's blog post frames the roles this way: "Each AI company defines the use it will pay for and sets a price. Publishers decide which offers to accept, and then can see how often their content is used and what it has earned. Cloudflare handles enrollment, usage records, billing, and payment."

The buyer reports each use with a timestamp, the source URL, and an event ID. Cloudflare checks that the report matches an enrolled publisher, then bills the buyer monthly and pays the publishers. The company calls usage "self-reported" but says the program rules require complete reporting.

During the beta, Cloudflare works directly with each buyer and with publishers who opt in. The post does not name the AI companies buying through the program.

Where does this leave the broader market?

Cloudflare now operates three payment events: Pay Per Crawl, the new Gateway, and Pay Per Use. A Sept. 18 piece compared those programs with Google's AI contribution pilot and Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace.

For a publisher on Cloudflare, Pay Per Use means the AI company picks the use case and the price. The publisher decides whether to accept, and the buyer's reports drive the earnings. A U.S.-based seller of an API, MCP tool, or dataset controls its per-request pricing once admitted to the Gateway beta.

Neither Cloudflare post reports transaction counts or payouts. Cloudflare says the Pay Per Use beta will help it work out how to let publishers counter a buyer's price and charge differently by use. The company also says Gateway support for new geographies is "on the way."

The biggest question left open is which AI companies are buying through Pay Per Use. Cloudflare has not said.