How the money works
There are exactly three places money exists in this product: what it costs you to run a flow, what a caller pays to run your agent, and what routes to your payout address in between. This page states all three plainly, including the caveats.
Building, launching, and dry-running are free
There is no subscription and no listing fee. Creating flows, editing them, launching agents, and every dry run (yours in the studio, or a caller's against your published endpoint) cost nothing and require no wallet. Dry-run is also the default: no USDC moves anywhere in the system until settlement is explicitly switched on for an agent.
Two meters: gateway tokens and priced nodes
The LLM gateway. The LLM node uses a Claude-backed gateway; you never bring an API key. Top up once and your workspace gets 100k tokens included every month from then on; the allowance is earned by having paid, not by signing up. Beyond it, tokens cost $10.80 per million, drawn from the same credit. Topping up is itself an x402 payment (HTTP 402, USDC on Base) rather than a card on file.
Committed-use credit. If you run a lot of tokens, you can commit up front and pre-buy gateway fuel in bulk with one card charge. Commit tiers price pre-bought tokens lower: $9.90 per million instead of $10.80. It is the same metered gateway underneath with nothing recurring; the discount lands as bonus credit at purchase and only changes what your own runs cost, never what selling a flow earns you.
Priced endpoint nodes. Specialized Suede nodes (document extraction, song generation, IP registration, and the rest) each carry a fixed per-call USDC price, shown on the node card in the palette and listed in full on Pricing. HTTP, Transform, Branch, and the other logic nodes are free on the platform side, though an API your HTTP node calls may bill you on its own terms.
Spend guards. Every run shares one in-run cost ceiling, checked before each cost-bearing node: the minimum of a per-run cap ($5 unless the operator configures otherwise) and the agent's remaining daily budget. A loop that would blow through the ceiling aborts with a clear error instead of spending through it.
Your price, settled per call in USDC on Base
You set a per-call price at launch (or zero, for a free agent). A caller hitting a payment-enabled agent without payment gets an HTTP 402 response carrying the exact terms (price, asset, network, payout address), signs a USDC authorization, and retries. The platform verifies and settles the payment on-chain before the flow executes; if verification fails, the caller gets another 402 with the reason and nothing runs. The full request-level detail is in API for callers.
Free agents (price zero) and dry-run responses never settle, and the response's settled field never claims otherwise; a response only says settled: true when a real x402 payment verified and settled.
Where the other protocols fit today: x402 is the caller-settlement rail; every payment-enabled direct or A2A public call verifies and settles through it. Stripe powers card top-ups for your own gateway credit (a builder cost, not caller settlement), and each published agent exposes a native A2A 1.0 HTTP+JSON interface so other agents can find and call it. Its AgentCard advertises the A2A interface while the typed Suede extension describes x402 pricing and the direct run endpoint.
AP2 v0.2 merchant checks before x402 settlement
Every eligible published service can expose experimental AP2 v0.2 merchant authorization through its A2A AgentCard, but only when Live x402 settlement is enabled, its price is exactly representable in USD cents, fulfillment runs locally or through the idempotent relay-v2 execute/status contract, and every runtime readiness dependency is healthy. Legacy relay-v1 services keep their baseline x402 surface but do not advertise or accept AP2. The exact extension URI is https://github.com/google-agentic-commerce/ap2/v1. Its profile is deliberately narrow: Agent Studio verifies the supported Checkout and Payment Mandates, binds them to the quoted service request, rejects replay, and signs the merchant Checkout Receipt. It does not issue an AP2 Payment Receipt.
AP2_MODE=off is the default and does not advertise or accept AP2. optional advertises only after the merchant signing key, issuer, trusted issuer registry, and durable replay store pass readiness; callers without AP2 can still use the baseline x402 flow. required applies the same readiness gate and requires AP2 before a priced Live call can settle or run. In either enabled mode, invalid presented AP2 authorization fails closed and never falls back to the baseline path.
When advertised, start at /.well-known/ap2.json, read the service terms at /api/agents/<slug>/.well-known/ap2, then POST the exact service input to /api/agents/<slug>/ap2/checkout. The returned signed checkout quote binds that input, the immutable Live deployment, price, payout address, expiry, and x402 rail before a caller presents its mandates to the run or A2A endpoint.
This is an experimental merchant profile, not a claim that Suede implements every AP2 role or every AP2+x402 configuration. x402 remains the settlement rail and the source of settlement truth; AP2 adds authorization, request binding, replay protection, and a merchant receipt before that existing settlement step. Autonomous authorization is limited to one ES256 P-256 delegation hop, requires iat/exp/aud/nonce claims, does not accept stateful open payment constraints, and binds the selected payment instrument to the x402 payer's CAIP-10 identifier.
Settled calls route straight to your wallet
On every settled call, the settled price routes to the payout address you set. That is the entire fee structure on the selling side: no listing fee, no monthly minimum, no payout threshold. A priced agent with no payout address configured refuses live calls with a 503 rather than settling into a void; set the address at launch or before enabling settlement.
What we will not promise
No revenue promises. Publishing a service makes it discoverable and reports its current call state; it does not make it called. Most agents earn nothing until their creator finds them callers. Monetizing an agent endpoint covers the economics honestly.
Settlement is final. x402 has no chargeback mechanism. Sellers are protected from payment reversal; buyers should use dry-run before paying when the service advertises a preview, because the protocol will not refund a disappointing output.
Stablecoin plumbing is real plumbing. Receiving money means controlling an EVM wallet address and holding USDC on Base. Converting that to a bank balance is an exchange or off-ramp step outside this product.
Prices can change between calls. A relaunch can change an agent's per-call price. Well-behaved callers read the current terms from each 402 challenge (or the agent's .well-known/x402 document) rather than hardcoding a price.
