Same 402.
Different traffic.

Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl and Agent Tolls share a thesis: machines should pay for the pages they read, and the web already reserved the status code for it in 1997. We think Cloudflare validating that idea is good for everyone. Here is an honest map of where the two are different.

Side by side.

Agent Tolls Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl
Built for The long tail — personal AI agents fetching pages on a person's behalf Large AI crawlers — the big, named bots indexing at scale
Works on Any site — a DNS-level install, whoever hosts or registers your domain Sites on Cloudflare's network
Who pays Any agent carrying an x402-enabled wallet — no registration with anyone Crawlers enrolled with Cloudflare
Pricing Owner-set, per path: $0.02 default, /premium/* at $0.10, changed any time Set within Cloudflare; announced as a flat per-request price for the site
Settlement On-chain USDC — Base or Solana, agent's choice — with a public receipt per toll Billed and paid out through Cloudflare, which acts as merchant of record
Where the money lands Your own wallet, through an immutable 85/15 split contract — non-custodial Your Cloudflare account relationship
Human readers Untouched — the gate is invisible to browsers, nothing to click Untouched — it addresses crawler traffic
Payment rail x402, the open standard backed by Coinbase and Cloudflare Cloudflare's own crawler-billing flow, built around HTTP 402

Pay Per Crawl details reflect Cloudflare's public announcement and may evolve — check Cloudflare's documentation for the current state. Everything in the Agent Tolls column is live in production today and shown on the docs page, real 402 included.

Which one fits your site?

Pay Per Crawl fits when…

  • your site already runs on Cloudflare and you want the feature where your CDN is;
  • your machine traffic is dominated by the big, named crawlers;
  • you prefer billing handled in fiat by a platform you already trust.

Agent Tolls fits when…

  • you want a gate on any site, regardless of host, CDN or registrar;
  • your readers are increasingly personal agents, not just index crawlers;
  • you want per-path prices, and the money settling in your own wallet with no platform in between.

FAQ

Do Agent Tolls and Pay Per Crawl compete?

They share a thesis — machines should pay for the pages they read — and aim at different traffic. Pay Per Crawl addresses large, named AI crawlers on Cloudflare's network. Agent Tolls is built for the long tail of personal AI agents, on any site. For many sites the two are not even a choice: the crawler that indexes you and the agent a person sends to read you are different visitors.

Can I use Agent Tolls if my site is on Cloudflare?

Yes. The gate is a DNS-level install and Cloudflare is one of the DNS hosts the dashboard supports directly — the setup guide links its console and supports its one-token connect. Your DNS stays yours either way: point it away and you're out any time.

Why does Agent Tolls settle over x402 instead of billing through a platform?

x402 is the open payment standard backed by Coinbase and Cloudflare. Any agent carrying a funded wallet can pay without registering with anyone, and every toll settles on-chain — USDC on Base or Solana — straight to the site owner's wallet through an immutable split contract, with a public receipt per toll. No merchant of record sits between the owner and the money.

Open the long-tail lane.

Fifteen minutes of DNS, no subscription, and every toll lands in your wallet.

Start now Read the docs