Cloudflare opens beta for Pay Per Use and Monetization Gateway

Cloudflare opened two payment products in beta on 30 September: Pay Per Use, which pays publishers when AI products use their content, and the Monetization Gateway, which charges AI agents for access to a site, an API, an MCP tool or a dataset. Both address the same gap: most web traffic now comes from machines that never see a checkout page.

Pay for the use, not the crawl

AI answer engines read a publisher's page and hand the reader a summary, so the visit and its revenue never happen. Cloudflare outlined Pay Per Use in July as a way for publishers to say "yes, if you pay". A buyer offers a price for a specific use of the content, the publisher decides whether to accept, and the buyer reports each use. Cloudflare bills the buyer and pays the publisher monthly.

Charging for the crawl makes buyers pay before they know what they need, Cloudflare argues, while charging for the use ties the price to the value a buyer gets. Pay Per Crawl, launched in 2025, charges for access; Pay Per Use pays for what happens next. Participants identify their crawlers through Verified Bots and report each use through one API.

Publishers see how often each AI company uses their content and what it earned, and Cloudflare plans to add more context to each use without exchanging personal data.

An HTTP 402 gateway for agents

The Monetization Gateway covers the opposite case: resources where every request is the use, such as APIs and data. Sellers set the price and choose where the money goes. A buyer without payment gets the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code instead of the resource, then the content once payment settles. Payments run over the open x402 protocol and settle on the Base blockchain in USDC. The gateway is in closed beta for U.S.-based sellers and buyers.

Four customers in production

Cloudflare named four live use cases. Its own AI Gateway lets U.S. customers pay for inference at request time with a PAYMENT-METHOD: x402 header. Ceramic.ai, a search API for agents with an index of over 40 billion pages, returns results in as little as 50 milliseconds. Stocktwits, a markets network with over 10 million users, sells individual signals such as sentiment and trending tickers to agents.

Why it matters

Both products rest on the same foundations: identity, metering and analytics. Cloudflare's pitch is that publishers should not have to choose between blocking every agent and giving their work away, and that agents need payment rails that are cheap, fast and predictable rather than subscriptions built for human buyers.

Sources: Cloudflare Blog: Pay Per Use · Cloudflare Blog: Monetization Gateway