HTTP 402 · Payment Required

Run the books for the machine-payments web.

Wallets, spend controls, receipts and reconciliation for the agents that pay and the services that get paid.

Early access for design partners. No spam, just one note when we open.

Agent wallet ops

Funded wallets with per-task budgets, spend limits and anomaly alerts. Balances, funding rules and receipts in one place.

Reconciliation & accounting

Millions of sub-cent receipts turned into clean revenue recognition, invoices and export to your accounting stack.

Delivery assurance

Stablecoins have zero chargebacks. Verify delivery, flag overcharging and non-delivery, and give buyers recourse.

§ What is 402

A status code that waited thirty years for its moment.

402 Payment Required has been reserved in the HTTP spec since the 1990s, a placeholder for a payments web that never arrived. Cards were too slow and too costly for a two-cent API call, so the web ran on ads and subscriptions instead.

The x402 protocol finally puts it to work. A server answers a request with 402 and a price; the client pays (typically in stablecoins, settled in seconds for a fraction of a cent), retries with proof of payment, and gets the resource. No account, no card form. A payment handshake at the speed of an HTTP request.

the whole business model, in one exchange
 GET /api/report/today
← 402 Payment Required          price: $0.002 USDC
 GET /api/report/today          X-PAYMENT: <signed>
← 200 OK                         + settlement receipt
§ Why now

The sell side is being built by giants. The rest is missing.

Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway lets anyone put a price on any URL: the edge meters usage, verifies payment and settles to the seller's wallet. AWS and Google are converging on the same open protocol. AI agents, which can't type card numbers but can sign payments, are the natural first customers: paying per crawl, per API call, per answer.

But the gateways stop at "money received." Everything operational around the payment, on both sides of it, is left as an exercise for the participant. That exercise is 402ops.

§ What 402ops does

Payment logistics for both sides of the 402.

buy side

Agent wallet operations

Funded wallets for your agents with budgets per task, spend limits, allowlists and anomaly alerts, so "my agent spent $40 overnight" is a dashboard entry, not a mystery.

buy side

Receipts & audit trail

Every 402 payment captured with what was bought, from whom and at what price. Queryable, exportable and attributable to a task, a team or a customer.

sell side

Reconciliation & accounting

Millions of sub-cent stablecoin receipts turned into clean revenue recognition, invoices and export to your accounting stack. Micropayments in, bookkeeping out.

both sides

Delivery assurance

Stablecoins have zero chargebacks. We verify delivery, flag overcharging and non-delivery, and give buyers recourse: trust machinery the protocol itself doesn't provide.

Protocol-level and gateway-neutral: 402ops works whether the seller sits behind Cloudflare, CloudFront, or anything else that speaks x402.

§ Questions

The short version.

Is this a crypto product?+

It's a payments-operations product. x402 happens to settle in stablecoins; our job is to make that invisible: budgets in dollars, receipts in dollars, books in dollars.

Do I need to be on Cloudflare?+

No. The gateways are converging on the open x402 protocol; 402ops operates at the protocol level, on whichever side of the payment you're on.

When can I use it?+

It's early. The ecosystem itself is weeks old. Join the waitlist and we'll onboard the first design partners as the protocol goes live in the wild.

Who is it for?+

Teams running agents that pay for data and APIs, and services that want to sell per-request to those agents. Both sides need the same books.

Get early access

Stake your place in the machine-payments economy.

We're onboarding a small group of design partners on both sides of the 402. Add your email and we'll reach out.