How Paywallcompares
Honest comparisons between Paywall — pay-per-call in USDC over the open x402 protocol — and the other ways to charge AI agents and crawlers. We say plainly who each option is best for.
Stripe is mature card-rail infrastructure, now extending to agent-mediated commerce (e.g. its agentic / marketplace payment work). Paywall takes a different shape: an open x402 protocol where agents pay per call in USDC, with no card, no caller signup, and no chargebacks.
The traditional way to monetise an API is to issue API keys, meter usage, and invoice (often via a metered-billing provider). It works for known customers but assumes a human signs up first. Paywall lets agents pay per call with no key to provision.
L402 is an open pay-per-request scheme built on Bitcoin Lightning and macaroon-based tokens — also a 402-driven flow. Paywall builds on x402 with USDC on Base, a dollar-denominated stablecoin unit and official SDKs across nine languages.