Payments
Charge AI agents in dollars when they use your service
Loomal lets your service charge AI agents money each time they use it. Agents pay automatically — no API key juggling, no monthly subscriptions, no "talk to sales." A few cents per call, billed in real time.
Why charge per call?
AI agents now hit more services than humans do. They search, book, pull data, post on your behalf. Each call costs you compute, bandwidth, or third-party fees. Free APIs become unsustainable the moment a popular agent finds them.
Per-call billing solves it: every request the agent makes pays a small amount. You set the price — five cents, fifty cents, a dollar. The agent decides whether it's worth it.
How it works
- An agent calls your service.
- Your service tells the agent the price (e.g. "five cents").
- The agent agrees and pays.
- Your service returns the result.
Loomal handles the money flow, settlement, and bookkeeping behind the scenes. You add about ten lines of code to your existing service — see the quickstart.
What you'll see in the dashboard
Every paid call shows up in console.loomal.ai → your project → Pay:
- Who paid
- How much
- Which endpoint
- When
- Status (success or failed)
- A clickable link to the public ledger
Your wallet balance updates within seconds. The funds are yours — cash out anytime.
What it costs
You set the price per call. There's no minimum.
| Price | Use case |
|---|---|
| $0.001 | Sub-cent metering — high-volume APIs where a fraction of a penny adds up |
| $0.05 | Common for paid API calls — search, lookup, transformation |
| $1.00 | Premium endpoints — expensive compute or real-time data |
| $50.00 | High-value transactions — once-off operations |
Loomal doesn't take a percentage of your revenue.
Who's paying you?
Your buyers are AI agents — programs acting on behalf of a person, typically through Claude, ChatGPT, or a custom-built agent. Each agent has a wallet that Loomal sets up automatically the first time its owner configures spending limits.
The owner sets a daily cap (e.g. "at most $5/day on this project") and Loomal enforces it. No credit card, no manual transfer. If the cap is hit or the wallet is empty, the agent gets a clear failure message and nothing is charged.
Money in vs money out
Every Loomal project can both earn and spend. The same wallet handles both.
- Accept — turn on if your service charges agents. Settings → Pay → Accept.
- Spend — turn on if this project's agent should pay other services. Settings → Pay → Spend.
Most projects start with one. Mature projects often do both — an agent that pays for upstream data and resells the result.
What you get every time you're paid
- A row in your dashboard with the full details
- A receipt you can verify offline (cryptographic proof the payment happened)
- An entry in the activity log
- An optional webhook to your server (so you can update your own systems)
- An optional email notification
The currency
Payments are made in USDC — a digital dollar. One USDC always equals one US dollar, backed by Circle. It runs on a fast, low-fee network called Base.
Why this and not credit cards?
- Per-call works at any size. A tenth of a cent is fine. Card networks take a 30¢ minimum.
- No credit checks for buyers. Agents don't have credit scores. They have wallets.
- Funds settle in seconds, not days.
You don't need to know anything about crypto to use it — Loomal handles wallet creation, signatures, and on-chain transfers. You just see a USD balance.
Setup at a glance
To start charging:
- Open console.loomal.ai → your project.
- Toggle Settings → Pay → Accept on.
- Add the paywall to your service. The fastest path is the official SDK middleware —
@loomal/sdkfor Express / Hono / MCP,loomal-sdkfor FastAPI — which collapses the integration to about five lines on top of any handler. Pure REST works too if you're on a framework we don't ship middleware for. See the quickstart. - Done. The first paid call lands in the Pay tab the moment an agent calls.
To start spending:
- Open console.loomal.ai → your project.
- Toggle Settings → Pay → Spend on.
- Set per-call and daily caps.
- Top up the wallet with a few dollars of USDC.
Common questions
Do I need to know anything about crypto? No. You set prices in dollars. Loomal does the rest.
What if my buyer reverses the payment? They can't. Once it lands, it's final.
Can I refund? Refunds are manual today — contact support during the closed beta. A self-service refund flow is on the roadmap.
Do I need to register every endpoint in advance? No. Calls work without registration. Registering an endpoint unlocks per-endpoint webhooks, revenue counters, and named statistics in the dashboard.
Is this live for everyone? Payments is in beta. Each Loomal instance has a feature toggle (Admin → Settings → Payments) that workspace owners flip when ready.