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Tollbooth for SEO agencies

Payment wires: every paid endpoint accepts x402 and MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) on the same 402 - see Paying with x402 and Paying with MPP. Agent402 is the applied layer of Agentic Finance: agents that pay and get paid on their own.

A playbook for agencies (boutique → mid-market) that want to add "we'll put a price on AI crawling of your site, and settle it straight to your wallet" to their service menu - with a gate that is not tied to any one host or CDN.

If you're a publisher with one or two sites, the install page at agent402.tools/tollbooth is enough. This page is for someone deploying across 10-100 client properties.

The pitch (to your client)

Tollbooth is an open, self-hostable pay-per-crawl gate:

  • Put a cost on AI crawling today: known AI crawlers get a 402 and must pay or solve a proof-of-work, with no cooperation needed from the crawler's operator.
  • Get paid by agents that pay: any x402 or MPP client can settle the 402, and USDC settles direct to the publisher's wallet (no merchant of record, no agency in the middle of the money).
  • Portable across hosts: Express, Next.js middleware, a reverse proxy, a Cloudflare Worker, Deno or Bun. WordPress plugin in beta. When a client changes hosts, the gate moves with them.

Pricing & partner economics

Solo Team Agency Enterprise
Price $19/mo $99/mo $299/mo Contact
Sites 1 25 100 Unlimited
Retention 30d 90d 1y Custom

Annual prepay = 16% off (2 months free). Tollbooth Cloud is on a waitlist and not yet launched: the plan features below describe what the plans are built to include. Full pricing and waitlist at agent402.tools/tollbooth/cloud.

Partner program: 20% lifetime recurring on every Team or Agency plan you refer. Paid via Stripe - not USDC - so the protocol's non-custodial promise stays clean (we never touch the publisher's settled funds, and neither does your kickback). Apply via the partner-program link on the Cloud page.

A 5-step deployment playbook for many sites

Step 1 · Inventory client UA traffic before you sell

Run agent402-tollbooth in observe mode on each candidate site for 7-14 days. The gate classifies every request as human-vs-crawler and counts what would have been charged - but never returns 402. This gives you a real number to put in the client deck instead of an industry-average guess.

import { createTollbooth } from "agent402-tollbooth";
app.use(createTollbooth({ observe: true }));

Or as a Cloudflare Worker / Next.js middleware - see Pay-per-crawl Walkthrough. When you flip on enforcement, the same code starts returning 402; nothing about the classifier changes.

Step 2 · Pick the right charge mode per client

Mode Who pays When to use it
bots (default) The 28 crawler/scraper user-agents in AI_BOTS News publishers, blogs, anyone who still wants Googlebot/Bingbot. Pick this by default.
all Anyone but a free() match API endpoints, paywalled APIs, anything where you don't want passive scraping
strict Anyone without a real-browser UA + HTML Accept Premium content where you accept some false-positive friction

Configure per-site via the mode option or the TOLLBOOTH_MODE env. You can also override with custom charge(req) / free(req) predicates for client-specific allowlists (e.g. "always free for the client's monitoring bot").

Step 3 · One wallet per client, one shared stats sink

Each client site sets its own payTo wallet - the USDC settles direct to the client, never to you. For multi-site rollup, point every site's statsSink at the same HTTP endpoint (your hosted dashboard on Tollbooth Cloud, or your own ingest service). The OSS gate ships both kvStatsSink (Cloudflare KV, per-Worker) and httpStatsSink (any HTTP endpoint).

import { createTollbooth, httpStatsSink } from "agent402-tollbooth";

app.use(createTollbooth({
  payTo: process.env.CLIENT_USDC_WALLET,
  price: "$0.002",
  observe: true,                                  // Phase 1
  // One collector URL per site (the path is your multi-site tag);
  // the token is sent as Authorization: Bearer and requires https.
  statsSink: httpStatsSink("https://stats.your-agency.com/ingest/client-acme", {
    token: process.env.TOLLBOOTH_INGEST_TOKEN,
  }),
}));

The wire format is documented in tollbooth/sinks.js

  • batched POSTs of { incr: { field: n, … }, ts } (aggregate counter deltas, flushed every 2 seconds by default), never per-request data, and a GET on the same URL returns the aggregated snapshot. Store it wherever you like.

Step 4 · Set per-client alert thresholds

The Cloud Team and Agency plans are built to set per-site alert rules without code (waitlist; until launch, alert from your own stats sink). The defaults you'll want for most clients:

  • Spike alert: charged requests in last hour > 5× the trailing-7-day median → email + Slack. Catches a new crawler campaign before it racks up cost (or, in observe mode, before it gobbles content).
  • Settlement alert: any settled USDC > $0 → email. The first time a client's wallet gets paid is the moment that converts the client from "interested" to "evangelist."
  • Health alert: classification rate (charged / total) drops to 0 for

    30 min → email. Means either the gate broke or you got knocked offline.

Step 5 · Monthly client report

The Cloud Team plan is built to produce a monthly PDF per site (waitlist) with:

  • Total requests, classified bot %, top 5 bot user-agents
  • USDC settled this month, lifetime USDC settled (linked to a Basescan proof URL - clients love trustless evidence)
  • Most-charged paths (which content is most attractive to AI crawlers - doubles as a content-strategy signal)
  • A graph of bot share over time (the chart you put in next quarter's retainer renewal deck)

A reporting API for pulling the same data into your own stack is planned for the hosted Team tier, which is still in early access - join the waitlist at https://agent402.tools/tollbooth/cloud. Today, export it from gate.stats() or the /__tollbooth/stats endpoint on your own deployment.

Deploying across heterogeneous client stacks

Client stack Recommended deployment
Node / Express app.use(createTollbooth(...)) directly. ~5 min.
Next.js middleware.js template at tollbooth/deploy/nextjs. ~5 min.
Anything behind Cloudflare Cloudflare Worker template at tollbooth/deploy/cloudflare. ~10 min, KV-backed, no origin change.
WordPress The Agent402 Tollbooth plugin (beta - see tollbooth/deploy/wordpress). Upload, activate, paste your wallet, done.
Any other backend Run the package as a reverse proxy: TOLLBOOTH_UPSTREAM=https://origin.example.com npx agent402-tollbooth. Drop into a Docker compose.
Static (Netlify / Vercel) Sit a Cloudflare Worker in front. The Worker template works unchanged.

The portability is the agency selling point: your install playbook is the same gate on any of the above stacks, just a different deploy target. What you sell is AI-crawl monetization that survives a hosting migration.

White-label setup (Agency plan, on the waitlist)

As the Agency plan is built to work at launch:

  1. Create a CNAME record: tollbooth.your-agency.com → cloud.agent402.tools.
  2. In the Agency dashboard, register the subdomain. We provision a TLS cert (Let's Encrypt) and serve your branded dashboard at the CNAME.
  3. Set your agency name + logo. The dashboard, the monthly PDF, and the alert emails all show your brand. The footer says "powered by Agent402"
    • that's the only attribution.

What we don't do (so you can plan around it)

  • We don't email or sell to your clients. Cloud customer-of-record is the agency on Team/Agency plans. Your client never sees our checkout.
  • We don't take a cut of settled USDC. Ever. The protocol's non-custodial promise is structural, not aspirational. Your client's wallet is the only address that ever holds their pay-per-crawl revenue.
  • We don't ship a "managed bot intelligence" feed. The classifier is the static UA list in tollbooth/bots.js plus the strict heuristic; we don't run a SaaS-fed signature service. If a new AI crawler shows up, you (or a community PR) add it to the list.

Apply

  • Pricing + plan comparison: agent402.tools/tollbooth/cloud
  • Waitlist (pre-launch - anyone in gets the launch price for life): link on the Cloud page
  • Partner program application: also on the Cloud page (separate form)
  • Questions: open an issue on the repo

See also: