Pay-per-Call: When Agents Can Pay

​What happens when an agent can actually pay for things on the internet?

​This is a hands-on workshop about machine payments, micropayments, and the kinds of services they unlock.

​A lot of useful tools are naturally paid, but signup flows, cards, subscriptions, and account creation add too much friction for agents. I work at Tempo, and I’ll use MPP as the main example here because it’s the system I’m most familiar with, but the session is really about the broader ideas around machine payments.

​I'm especially interested in micropayments, since current payment rails are bad at tiny transactions. That opens up weird and interesting possibilities, examples:

• ​Pay per API call,

• ​Receive payments per chunk for a torrent,

• ​Pay per LLM token generated,

• ​Pay per second of compute,

• ​Pay per scraped page, search result, or dataset row.

​I'll give out some funds, point people or their agents at a few services, and we'll experiment. You'll leave with a clearer mental model for agent payments and a better sense of what becomes possible once payment friction drops.

​Bring a laptop if you want to follow along and spend someone else's money, having an agent setup helps. Watching is fine too.