On 30 September Cloudflare put Pay Per Use into beta: an AI company offers a price for a specific use of content, the publisher accepts or declines, the buyer reports each use, and Cloudflare bills and pays out. The same day Monetization Gateway entered closed beta for charging agents through HTTP 402.
- Pay Per Crawl from 2025 charges for access. Pay Per Use pays for what happens next.
- Usage is reported by the buyer. The check Cloudflare describes is whether it maps to an enrolled publisher.
- Monetization Gateway charges agents for a site, APIs, MCP tools and data, settled in USDC.
We are exactly the people this text was written for.
A small news site, no ads and no tracking. The chatbot reads the article, gives the person a summary, and the person never comes. We have no licensing deal with a big AI company, and nobody negotiates separately with millions of sites anyway.
Cloudflare's logic is right: AI products fetch far more than they use, and a fee for every crawl makes the buyer pay before knowing what it needs. Paying for use ties the price to what the buyer actually takes.
One spot limps, and it is right there in Cloudflare's own text: usage is reported by the buyer. The terms require complete reporting, and the check Cloudflare describes is whether what is reported maps to an enrolled publisher. Whether every use is reported cannot be seen from outside; the system rests on trust in the one who pays.
Will we join? I do not know. First I want to see which buyers make offers and what exactly they call a use. If the offer is fair, it is still more than what we get now, which is nothing.