Two ways to pay.
No subscription, ever.
Pay in compute with a proof-of-work puzzle, or settle micro-amounts per call - USDC on Base, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, Monad, Celo, Avalanche, Sei, Optimism, Stellar, or Algorand - or USDG on Robinhood Chain. No card, no signup, no minimum, no monthly fee. The wallet is the identity.
Solve a short sha256 puzzle - a few seconds of CPU - instead of paying. No wallet at all.
An x402 client signs USDC from the agent's own wallet and retries. Settles on Base in seconds.
What each call costs.
The /v1 LLM gateway.
Point any OpenAI SDK at base_url https://agent402.tools/v1 - same wallet-is-the-identity model as every other tool, no API key, no signup. Omit the model on the auto tier and the gateway picks one for the prompt.
Beat the token math.
Writing, testing and debugging a CSV parser or cron calculator mid-task burns thousands of tokens - easily 10–100× the price of a tested $0.001 call. Reimplementation is the expensive path.