Standard

HTTP 402 Payment Required

HTTP status code 402, named "Payment Required", reserved in the HTTP specification for payment-related responses.

Known aliases

402 Payment Required

Current stories

buildConfirmed3 publishers

Cloudflare opens a closed beta that bills AI agents per request over HTTP 402

Cloudflare put its Monetization Gateway into closed beta, letting domain owners charge AI agents per request via HTTP 402, with four use cases in production. Cloudflare scopes it to APIs, tools and data, where each request is a single use.

Publishers:blog.cloudflare.com dev.to thenewstack.io

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers

Builder: Builder 58%
Operator: Operator 22%
Investor: Investor 20%

Reality

Evidence60
Adoption20
Hype gap+20
Incentives70
Confidence60

buildOne report1 publisher

x402 turns a paid API call into a 402 retry with two headers and a USDC transfer

The published client retries a 402 by signing a USDC transfer on Base and stuffing the transaction hash into a header. It works inside an ordinary httpx call, and it blocks for about three seconds before the retry goes out.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption: Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives: Not scored
Confidence45

leadershipOne report1 publisher

AWS moves the price of AI crawler access into a firewall rule

AWS WAF's Bot Control can now answer an AI agent with an HTTP 402 and payment instructions. The action runs only on CloudFront distributions, and AWS says the classification behind it is probabilistic and should be tested first.

Publishers:docs.aws.amazon.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption: Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives70
Confidence58

investOne report1 publisher

Cardano turns HTTP's reserved 402 code into a per-call payment prompt for AI agents

Cardano's integration has landed in the x402 toolkit, so an autonomous agent can buy a single API call without an account, an API key or a subscription plan behind it. Whether anyone sells that way is a separate question.

Publishers:cryptobriefing.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption18
Hype gap+25
Incentives65
Confidence45

buildOne report1 publisher

Paying for a crawl means retrying every priced URL with a transaction hash

HTTP 402 sat in the spec unused since 1991. The x402 flow makes it callable. The work lands inside your crawler: two origin requests per priced page, a funded wallet on the server's chain, and settlement checked before any retry.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence44
Adoption18
Hype gap+42
Incentives58
Confidence46