Cloudflare Pay per crawl vs s402
Both belong to the HTTP 402 family group on this map.
| Cloudflare Pay per crawl | s402 s402 | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 an agent pay a Sui-native resource using six payment schemes (including prepaid batching and escrow), while staying wire-compatible with plain x402 clients? |
| Governed by | Cloudflare (single vendor) | Single open-source project (s402-protocol on GitHub); no standards body, no foundation; explicitly a 'profile' of x402 rather than a competing standards effort |
| Status (issuer's words) | Closed beta; documentation updated 2026-07-28 | Archived repository (observed 2026-10-16) |
| Phase | candidate | deprecated |
| Version | closed beta (2026-07-28) | Wire Format Specification v1, Draft, dated March 2026 (repository has continued past this to align with x402 v2) (2026-03) |
| Form / transport | HTTP header | HTTP header |
| Found at | HTTP 402 response carrying a crawler-price header | none — no /.well-known/s402.json was found; discovery is per-request via the 402 envelope, matching x402's model |
| Adoption | unmeasured | unmeasured |
| Evidence | 1 verified, 1 reported | 4 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/s402-protocol/core/main/docs/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 s402 when your question is “How can an agent pay a Sui-native resource using six payment schemes (including prepaid batching and escrow), while staying wire-compatible with plain x402 clients?” and you accept its maturity: phase deprecated, adoption unmeasured. It is no longer maintained; prefer its successor.
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?
- s402: How can an agent pay a Sui-native resource using six payment schemes (including prepaid batching and escrow), while staying wire-compatible with plain x402 clients?