How the money works

Every run is billed at what it cost, plus 20%

There is no subscription and no listing fee. Every run your workspace starts (yours in the studio, a schedule, or a caller's unpaid call to your published endpoint) is billed from your prepaid credit at what it cost plus a 20% platform fee. The cost is the gateway tokens and priced nodes described below; the fee is 20% of that total, rounded to the nearest millionth of a dollar. A run that used neither costs nothing, so a dry run with no settled calls is not charged. The fee is taken when the run ends, and a run that fails is billed for what it used before it failed. A live run does not start without positive credit. A caller's paid x402 call carries no platform fee, though its model usage is still paid from your credit at provider cost. Dry-run is the default for callers: no caller USDC moves until settlement is explicitly switched on for an agent.

What a run costs: gateway tokens and priced nodes

The LLM gateway. The LLM node uses a Claude-backed gateway; you never bring an API key. Every model call inside a run is paid from prepaid credit at that model's provider list rate, with no gateway margin (Claude Sonnet 4.6: $3.00 in / $15.00 out per 1M tokens); the run's 20% fee is the only markup. Model calls outside a flow run (the gateway API, and built-in features such as Guided and Company drafting) are billed at the provider rate plus 20% ($3.60 in / $18.00 out per 1M tokens). Before a call runs, its maximum possible cost is set aside from your credit, so a model call never runs on credit you do not have. Top up by card (Stripe) or with an x402 payment in USDC on Base; committed-use packs are card-only.

Priced actions. Every action that costs money or delivers a result (an audit, a data lookup, a draft, a phone minute, an email send) is paid from credit and priced before you click: a fixed price, or the provider's rate plus 30% for third-party data and messaging. The full list is on the pricing page, and your balance and every charge are on your credit page. Editing, dry runs and viewing are free.

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 gateway calls outside a run lower (Sonnet 4.6: $3.30 in / $16.50 out per 1M tokens). It is the same metered gateway underneath with nothing recurring; the discount lands as bonus credit at purchase, which pays for runs too, and it never changes what selling a flow earns you.

Priced Suede nodes. The public Suede media nodes (song, video, and image generation) carry a fixed per-call USDC price, shown on the node card in the palette and listed 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, or when a signed-in buyer paid the price from their Suede credit (that response also carries payment.rail: "credit").

Pay with credit: on a payment-enabled agent's page, a signed-in buyer can pay the agent's listed price from their prepaid credit instead of USDC. It is an explicit opt-in ({ "payWith": "credit" }) from the signed-in browser session, never implicit, and it debits exactly the listed price. If the run cannot start, the debit is returned. The creator's share is recorded in the same earnings ledger as x402 calls and is owed to the creator, not paid out automatically.

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). Credit packs are priced 3% + $0.30 above face value, by card or USDC; runs then bill at usage cost plus the 20% platform fee, with no second fee. 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 Checkout 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 of its own settles to the platform wallet (or, with none configured, refuses live calls with a 503); set your address at launch or before enabling settlement.

Build your revenue workflow

Connect your service to paying customers. Publish a service for a recurring business task, set a price above its run cost, and share the endpoint with teams that need the result. Monetizing an agent endpoint walks through pricing, distribution, and repeat usage.

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.

Receive USDC in your wallet. 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.