Agents will outnumber human users on the web by orders of magnitude. Just like people, they will need a way to pay for services they use.
They may run into propriety health or finance data they need to pay for when doing a deep research task, or make a tool call to a bespoke web API for some functionality.
But unlike people, agents experience no friction when making a payment, so they can pay for things in much smaller units and increments than people will. An agent may need to call an API that they only need to use on a one-time basis or pay for information that they need without signing up for a subscription.
This means all forms of revenue streams can emerge for technology and information providers that wouldn’t have been possible before. To make this all work, we need will need new infra and tools for agents to do this, and it’s cool to see MPP from stripe and tempo.
