Monetization Gateway beta: charge AI agents for consumption with HTTP 402

Today, we’re making the Cloudflare Monetization Gateway available as part of a closed beta, and showcasing four customer use cases that are in production today. Since we announced the plan three months ago, we have been working closely with our customers to make the Gateway fast, flexible, and easy to use.

With just a few clicks, the Monetization Gateway allows domain owners to charge agents for access to their website, APIs, MCP tools, or datasets. Request access today in the Cloudflare Dashboard.

Proliferation of agents and machine payments

Today, most software businesses sell their products through subscriptions or prepaid credits. These business models require buyers to make a considerable upfront economic investment, so buyers limit themselves to a few subscriptions that fit into their budget. But this business model doesn’t align itself with how the predominant source of traffic on the Internet — agents — operates.

Agents seek outcomes, whether that’s sourced from a direct question or an implicit elicitation. To achieve an outcome, an agent may visit new sites, call MCP tools, or ingest data feeds. Businesses everywhere want to be in the critical path to help agents get better results. This helps them meet new users where they are, get paid for their inputs to those agents' answers, and take a leading position in headless agentic commerce.

Companies need to align their business models with the consumption patterns of agents to capture this opportunity. Payments must match an agent's consumption unit: per request, per search query, per token. The popular payment rails of today are unable to support this. These payment rails assume that the buyer will accept high latency, will only transact in large dollar values, and that they are a well-known, or identifiable, entity to the seller. Agents desire the opposite: cheap, fast, and reliable payment rails that can safely scale with minimal human intervention.