What is Micropayment?

A micropayment is a very small payment — often a fraction of a cent to a few cents. Pay-per-call API pricing is a micropayment use case: each request is charged individually rather than bundled into a monthly invoice.

Micropayments were historically impractical because card fees dwarfed the payment. Stablecoins on a low-fee network make per-call charging viable, which is what x402 is built around.