Chainfeeds Summary:
The real highlight of the x402 lies in its agentic workflow. If the past decade was about "turning people into logged-in users," then the next decade will be about "turning AI agents into paying users."
Article source:
https://www.decentralised.co/p/pricing-the-internet
Article Author:
Decentralized Thoughts
Opinion:
Decentralised.Co: Why Did Micropayments Fail? The dream of pay-per-minute billing is as old as the internet itself. Digital Equipment's Millicent protocol promised sub-cent transactions in the 1990s; Chaum's DigiCash piloted banking; Rivest's PayWord solved cryptographic problems. Every few years, someone rediscovers this elegant idea: what if you could pay $0.002 per article, $0.01 per song, exactly the cost? They all died for the same reason: humans hate measuring their enjoyment. AOL paid a heavy price for this in 1995. They charged by the hour for internet access, which was cheaper than a subscription for most users, but they hated the psychological burden. Every minute felt like a ticking time machine, every click felt like spending money, and people unconsciously perceived every tiny cost as a loss. When AOL launched unlimited data plans in 1996, usage tripled overnight. People preferred to pay more rather than think less. Pay-per-use sounds efficient, but for humans, it often feels like price-labeled anxiety. Odlyzko, in his 2003 paper "Against Micropayments," summarized this: people choose monthly subscriptions not out of rationality, but because the desire for predictability outweighs efficiency. Later experiments like Blendle and Google One Pass attempted to charge $0.25–$0.99, but ultimately failed due to low conversion rates and high psychological burdens. Once the network begins supporting native payments, the obvious question is: in which scenarios will it first take off? The answer is in high-frequency usage, where transaction amounts are typically below $1. This is precisely the area where subscription models overcharge light users. The upfront commitment of monthly subscriptions forces light users to pay a minimum subscription amount just to get started. x402, however, can settle every request at machine speed, with granularity down to $0.01, as long as blockchain fees remain feasible. Two forces make this shift seem imminent. On one hand, there's the explosive growth of work tokenization—LLM tokens, API requests, vector searches, and pings from IoT devices. Every meaningful action on the modern network exists in tiny, machine-readable units. On the other hand, SaaS pricing models lead to absurd waste—around 40% of licenses remain idle because finance teams prefer per-seat billing, which is easier to monitor and predict. We precisely measure work at the technical level, but charge humans per seat at the billing level. You're already seeing this trend in consumer AI. When you run out of your Claude messaging credit, it doesn't just say you've used it all and come back next week. It presents two paths: upgrade your subscription or pay per message to complete the current task. The missing piece is a programmable payment track that allows the agent to automatically take the second path on every request, without UI pop-ups, credit cards, or manual upgrades. For most B2B tools, the final practical form looks like a "subscription base + x402 peak billing." The team maintains a base scheme related to the number of users for collaboration, support, and general background use; while occasional high-computational tasks (build time, vector search, image generation) are billed via x402 instead of forcing an upgrade to a higher subscription tier. Better networks are also available. For example, Double Zero wants to sell faster, cleaner networks via dedicated fiber optic cables. By routing proxy traffic to them, you can be billed per GB via x402 with explicit SLAs and caps. Proxy services requiring low latency for transactions, rendering, or model jumps can briefly enter the fast lane, pay for the burst, and then exit.
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