Cloudflare moved two AI payment products into beta on Sept. 30, opening a way for U.S. sellers to charge AI agents for every request and for publishers to get paid when AI companies report using their content.

The Monetization Gateway lets sellers bill AI agents per request to an API, MCP tool, dataset, or site, at prices the seller sets. Cloudflare first announced the Gateway on July 1 and opened a waitlist. The product is now in closed beta, restricted to buyers and sellers based in the United States.

Pay Per Use, a separate beta product, compensates publishers when an AI company reports using their content after retrieval. Cloudflare's July announcement called it an experiment.

How the Gateway charges. The Gateway uses the x402 protocol and the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. When an agent tries to reach a protected resource, it first receives the payment terms and signs a payment authorization before retrying the request. Payment is processed within the request and verified before the seller's server responds, according to Cloudflare's documentation.

Each rule specifies the domain, URL, price, and target audience. The audience can be everyone or only verified bots identified by Cloudflare's BotBase. Fixed pricing makes requests with fixed inputs cost the same. Variable pricing authorizes a maximum limit, with the seller's origin reporting the actual paid amount. Settlements start at $0.001 and prices run up to $100.

Payments are processed in USDC stablecoin on the Base blockchain through Coinbase's x402 Facilitator. Cloudflare has announced plans to add more payment methods.

Who qualifies. Sellers need a credit card on file, a verified email address, and an account older than 60 days, according to the eligibility page. The zone must be proxied through Cloudflare, be more than 30 days old, and pass zone security checks. Sellers can request access through the dashboard.

Four live implementations. Cloudflare lists four live deployments, including its own AI Gateway, which accepts payment per inference request across four open models for U.S. users. Ceramic.ai offers a web search API for agents with fixed pay-per-search pricing and no API key required; in July, Cloudflare described Ceramic as a Pay Per Use partner. Stocktwits charges for each market signal request via a dedicated route for agents. API2PDF uses variable pricing based on compute and bandwidth per request. Cloudflare's post notes that asking API2PDF customers for a credit card after the first month caused a conversion drop of over 50%.

How Pay Per Use works. Cloudflare's post distinguishes the programs: Pay Per Crawl "charges for access," while Pay Per Use "pays for what happens next," such as a cited answer in AI search.

"Each AI company defines the use it will pay for and sets a price. Publishers decide which offers to accept, and then can see how often their content is used and what it has earned. Cloudflare handles enrollment, usage records, billing, and payment," the post states.

The buyer self-reports every use with a timestamp, the source URL, and the event ID. Program rules require complete reporting, and Cloudflare checks each reported use against an enrolled publisher, then bills the buyer and pays publishers monthly. Cloudflare is working directly with each buyer during the beta and has not named them. Neither beta post reports transaction counts or payouts.

For publishers, the trade-off is clear: the AI company defines the use and the price, and the usage data behind earnings comes from the buyer's own reports. A Sept. 18 comparison of AI content payment models now spans three Cloudflare payment events — Pay Per Crawl charges per retrieval, the Gateway charges per request, and Pay Per Use pays per reported use — alongside Google's AI contribution pilot and Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace.

Cloudflare says the Pay Per Use beta will help it work out how publishers can counter a buyer's price and charge differently by use. For the Gateway, support for new geographies is "on the way."