Cloudflare Pay per crawl vs L402
Both belong to the HTTP 402 family group on this map.
| Cloudflare Pay per crawl | L402 L402 | |
|---|---|---|
| Lifecycle step | 7 Pay: Settle the bill | 7 Pay: Settle the bill |
| Answers | How can a site charge an AI crawler per request, and how does the crawler agree to pay? | How can a client pay for, and then authenticate to, a metered API resource over the Lightning Network with no accounts or database-backed sessions? |
| Governed by | Cloudflare (single vendor) | Lightning Labs |
| Status (issuer's words) | Closed beta; documentation updated 2026-07-28 | Active, registered as an HTTP Authentication scheme (RFC 7235-style) |
| Phase | candidate | living |
| Version | closed beta (2026-07-28) | current protocol-specification.md on the master branch |
| Form / transport | HTTP header | HTTP header |
| Found at | HTTP 402 response carrying a crawler-price header | none — signalled per-request, no well-known file |
| Adoption | unmeasured | unmeasured |
| Evidence | 1 verified, 1 reported | 2 verified |
| Primary use case | Accept payments from agents | Accept payments from agents |
| Last verified | 2026-10-16 (current) | 2026-10-18 (current) |
| Specification | https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/features/pay-per-crawl/what-is-pay-per-crawl/ | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lightninglabs/L402/master/protocol-specification.md |
When to use which
- Choose Cloudflare Pay per crawl when your question is “How can a site charge an AI crawler per request, and how does the crawler agree to pay?” and you accept its maturity: phase candidate, adoption unmeasured.
- Choose L402 when your question is “How can a client pay for, and then authenticate to, a metered API resource over the Lightning Network with no accounts or database-backed sessions?” and you accept its maturity: phase living, adoption unmeasured.
Read the full articles
- Cloudflare Pay per crawl: How can a site charge an AI crawler per request, and how does the crawler agree to pay?
- L402: How can a client pay for, and then authenticate to, a metered API resource over the Lightning Network with no accounts or database-backed sessions?