Micropayment

A very small financial transaction — often a fraction of a cent to a few cents — historically impractical because fees exceeded the payment itself.

Micropayments are the economic model of the agentic web's access economics: metered, per-request pricing (x402, pay-per-crawl) instead of subscriptions or blocking.

term
Micropayment
category
commerce
short_def
A very small financial transaction — often a fraction of a cent to a few cents — historically impractical because fees exceeded the payment itself.
long_def
Micropayments enable pay-per-use at tiny amounts: a few cents for a single API call, an article, or a crawl. Traditional card rails make them uneconomic (fixed fees dwarf the amount), which is why agent-native rails like x402 and pay-per-crawl exist — programmable settlement makes per-request micropayments finally viable.
see_also
x402 pay-per-crawl stablecoin
etymology_origin
— verify-against-primary-at-build ↗ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment — concept dates to early web commerce (1990s); revived by low-fee digital rails
related_to
x402 pay-per-crawl stablecoin agentic-commerce
contrast_with
Unlike a normal card payment whose fixed fee makes small amounts uneconomic, a micropayment is a sub-cent-to-cents transfer that only works on low-fee programmable rails.
example
Pay-per-crawl charges an AI crawler a small amount per request — a micropayment that only becomes practical with agent-native settlement.
source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment
status
active
why_it_matters
Micropayments are the economic model of the agentic web's access economics: metered, per-request pricing (x402, pay-per-crawl) instead of subscriptions or blocking.
sameAs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment
bridge_entity
agentic-commerce
last_verified
2026-07-06
md_twin
/glossary/micropayment.md

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