Cloudflare Pay per crawl vs Machine Payments Protocol
Both belong to the HTTP 402 family group on this map. The map lists them as complementary: sites and agents commonly implement both.
| Cloudflare Pay per crawl | Machine Payments Protocol MPP | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 machine client (an agent, script, or another server) pay for an HTTP resource using any payment network, not just one? |
| Governed by | Cloudflare (single vendor) | Co-authored by Tempo and Stripe; the core specification (the abstract 402/Challenge/Credential/Receipt shape) is submitted to the IETF standards track as the Payment HTTP Authentication Scheme, while individual payment methods (Tempo, EVM, Stripe Card, Lightning, Solana, Stellar, Monad, NEAR Intents, RedotPay) are maintained separately from the core, to keep the core neutral to any one rail |
| Status (issuer's words) | Closed beta; documentation updated 2026-07-28 | Open protocol; developer docs distinguish the normative IETF specification from the mpp.dev developer-friendly overview |
| Phase | candidate | review |
| Version | closed beta (2026-07-28) | draft-httpauth-payment-01 (2026-09-09) |
| 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 | 5 verified |
| Primary use case | Accept payments from agents | Accept payments from agents |
| Last verified | 2026-10-16 (current) | 2026-10-19 (current) |
| Specification | https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/features/pay-per-crawl/what-is-pay-per-crawl/ | https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-httpauth-payment-01 |
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 Machine Payments Protocol when your question is “How can a machine client (an agent, script, or another server) pay for an HTTP resource using any payment network, not just one?” and you accept its maturity: phase review, 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?
- Machine Payments Protocol: How can a machine client (an agent, script, or another server) pay for an HTTP resource using any payment network, not just one?