Pay per call.
Pay per report.
Pay in compute with a proof-of-work puzzle, or settle micro-amounts per call - USDC on Base, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, Monad, Celo, Avalanche, Sei, Optimism, Stellar, or Algorand - or USDG on Robinhood Chain. No signup, no minimum; card welcome at /reports, and monitors are the one subscription ($5, cancel anytime). The wallet is the identity.
Solve a short sha256 puzzle - about 65,536 sha256 hashes on average, a fraction of a second of CPU on a laptop - instead of paying. No wallet at all.
An x402 client signs USDC from the agent's own wallet and retries. Settles in seconds on Base or any of the other x402 chains.
What each call costs.
The /v1 LLM gateway.
Point any OpenAI SDK at base_url https://agent402.tools/v1/metered and every request is quoted from its own body before payment, then settled at what the call actually used, under that quote. Same wallet-is-the-identity model as every other tool; an existing prepaid credits key also works as the API key. The flat tiers below stay for callers that want one fixed price; omit the model on the auto tier and the gateway picks one for the prompt.
Beat the token math.
Writing, testing and debugging a CSV parser or cron calculator mid-task burns thousands of tokens - easily 10–100× the price of a tested $0.001 call. Reimplementation is the expensive path.
Stop signing every call.
Per-call pricing is the point, but a signature per call is not. Paying exact over x402 means one authorization signed and one settlement waited on for every request, which is fine for ten calls and the wrong shape for ten thousand. On the metered gateway an approval made once turns each quote into a ceiling, still per-request priced and still settled only on a 200.
New credit packs are not on sale. A key already issued keeps working: send Authorization: Bearer a402_… on any paid route except the wallet-scoped ones (memory, usage). The list price is held before the call and debited only when it returns 200; on the metered gateway you are debited what the call actually used, not the quote.
A one-time Permit2 approval for USDC on Base turns every quote into a ceiling rather than a charge: the gateway settles the actual usage under it, per request, with no fixed tier to overpay into. Non-custodial on this rail, and the approval is yours to revoke.
The approval belongs to the wallet, so it applies to any client that pays from it, not only OpenClaw.