x402 pricing calculator - What should your API charge per request?
Enter your cost per call and expected volume. Get a USDC price per request, monthly revenue, a Stripe comparison and a ready-to-paste x402 config.
Your API
What one call costs you: infrastructure, upstream APIs, model tokens.
From AI agents and other clients.
Leave empty to use the suggested price.
Suggested price per request
$0.01
10,000 USDC atomic units, the value x402 puts on the wire
1.6× the median x402 payment on Base ($0.0061).
- Monthly revenue
- $1,000
- CDP facilitator fees
- $99.00
- Net after costs
- $701
- Net margin
- 70.1%
Versus card payments
- Charging each request by card would cost $0.30 in Stripe fees, 3,003% of the price.
- Selling $20 prepaid credit packs costs 4.4% in card fees, plus the accounts, API keys and billing you would have to build.
- Card fees only drop under 10% of a payment above $4.23.
Your x402 config
Express middleware with this price. Install @x402/express, @x402/core and @x402/evm (@x402/svm on Solana), then set FACILITATOR_URL and your receiving address. The CDP facilitator also needs a CDP API key: its seller quickstart wraps this setup for you.
import express from 'express'
import { paymentMiddleware, x402ResourceServer } from '@x402/express'
import { ExactEvmScheme } from '@x402/evm/exact/server'
import { HTTPFacilitatorClient } from '@x402/core/server'
const network = 'eip155:8453' // Base
// The facilitator verifies each payment and settles it onchain for you.
// With the CDP facilitator, also set CDP_API_KEY_ID and CDP_API_KEY_SECRET.
const facilitator = new HTTPFacilitatorClient({ url: process.env.FACILITATOR_URL! })
const app = express()
app.use(
paymentMiddleware(
{
'GET /api/resource': {
accepts: [{ scheme: 'exact', price: '$0.01', network, payTo: '0xYourAddress' }],
description: 'Paid per request',
},
},
new x402ResourceServer(facilitator).register(network, new ExactEvmScheme()),
),
)
app.get('/api/resource', (req, res) => res.json({ data: '...' }))Price $0.01 per request, $1,000 revenue per month.
Methodology - How the numbers work
The x402 pricing calculator suggests a price per API request by adding your cost per call to the Coinbase CDP facilitator fee, then dividing by one minus your target margin. It rounds up to two significant figures, so the price never falls below your target, and projects monthly revenue, fees and net margin from your expected paid requests.
- Facilitator fee: the first 1,000 settlements each month are free, then $0.001 each. Billable fees are spread over all your calls, so a low volume carries almost no fee.
- Price: (cost per call + fee per call) ÷ (1 − target margin), rounded up to whole USDC units (6 decimals) and two significant figures.
- Stripe: 2.9% + $0.30 per US card payment, applied to a single request and to a $20 prepaid credit pack.
- Benchmark: the median x402 payment on Base was $0.0061 between August 13 and September 13, 2026.
Sources
Checked October 19, 2026
x402 vs Stripe - What each payment costs on x402 and on Stripe
The card fee is fixed, so it swallows small payments. The x402 settlement fee is fixed too, but 300 times smaller, and zero inside the monthly free tier.
| Payment | Stripe fee | x402 fee (CDP) |
|---|---|---|
| $0.001 | $0.3030,003% of the payment | $0.001100% of the payment |
| $0.01 | $0.303,003% of the payment | $0.00110% of the payment |
| $0.10 | $0.30303% of the payment | $0.0011% of the payment |
| $1.00 | $0.3332.9% of the payment | $0.0010.1% of the payment |
| $10.00 | $0.595.9% of the payment | $0.0010.01% of the payment |
x402 fees shown past the free tier of 1,000 settlements a month. Stripe: standard US card pricing.
Market data - What AI agents pay for today
The median x402 payment on Base was $0.0061 between August 13 and September 13, 2026. Across the 100 busiest Bazaar listings, agents mostly bought search and data.
| What agents buy | Share of calls |
|---|---|
| Web search and content retrieval | 42% |
| Crypto market data and trading signals | 23.4% |
| People and company enrichment | 11.3% |
| Social media search | 7.5% |
| Onchain RPC and blockchain reads | 7.5% |
Share of 208,415 calls to the top 100 x402 Bazaar listings over 30 days, per Turnkey.
x402 pricing FAQ
Fees, minimum prices, networks and schemes, answered with sources.
The x402 protocol itself charges nothing. The Coinbase CDP facilitator, which verifies payments and settles them onchain, settles the first 1,000 payments each month for free, then charges $0.001 per settlement. Verification is always free, and buyers pay no gas.
Technically one USDC atomic unit, $0.000001. Economically, past the free tier, the $0.001 settlement fee should stay a small share of each payment: keeping it under 10% means charging at least about $0.01 per request. High-volume, sub-cent prices call for batch-settlement, which groups many payments into one onchain claim.
For small payments, by far. Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per US card payment, so any charge under $0.31 costs more in fees than it earns, and the fee only falls under 10% above $4.23. That is why card-based APIs sell prepaid credits and subscriptions, while x402 charges each request directly.
Prices are set in USD and paid in USDC, so the network does not change what you charge. The CDP facilitator settles on Base, Polygon, Arbitrum and Solana, and one endpoint can accept several networks at once by listing each of them in its accepted payments.
Use exact for a fixed price per request, the case this calculator models. Use upto when usage varies, such as tokens generated: the buyer authorizes a maximum and pays only for what is consumed. Batch-settlement, available on EVM networks, collects many payments and settles them in one onchain claim, which suits high-frequency, sub-cent calls.
An agent calls your endpoint, receives a 402 response with the price, network and receiving address, signs a USDC authorization and retries the same request: the whole exchange is plain HTTP. For discovery, the x402 Bazaar is a catalog of paid endpoints that agents query by capability, and endpoints settled through a facilitator such as CDP can be listed there.