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origini

Its a technical solution to a non existing problem.

99% of the big companies provide a standardized known way of paying stuff everyone is used to use.

Its a credit card.

Whatever happens somehow in the background, no one cares.

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Credit cards don't work for small-value transactions, which is exactly what you need for a pay-per-visit model. For human users, you'd also need to address privacy concerns, but for scrapers I suppose it's not necessary.

EDIT: And that's without mentioning the value of machine-readable payment requests, which is what x402 actually brings.

That’s where top-up helps. Pay $100 once with the credit card, check the box “top-up $50 when available funds drop below $10”.

Sure it’s a per-vendor setup, so you might need to do this for each 3rd party that requires payment, or use something like openrouter with a pool of funds.

Probably simpler than setting up and using x402.

This being per-vendor is the problem. I'm never going to pay in advance to use random websites, so in e.g. news this model leads to only a few big players getting paid.

I'm even less inclined to put tens of dollars into something my agent thinks might be interesting, but I wouldn't be opposed to putting a dollar in a "browsing budget" for the day.

>I'm never going to pay in advance to use random websites

Nobody is, which is exactly why x402 will never gain widespread adoption.

> openrouter with a pool of funds.

I mean, that's kinda what x402 is, no? I buy UDSC from Coinbase and then pay $0.05 to a site via AI and via x402.

Depends on what the future looks like. I guess this could bring what I always wanted. Less paywalls and micro transactions. I still suspect for the braves of the world it makes little sense. There are <5 search api players. Now for a random new publication that has a paywall it sounds great, something with infrequent access or even 1 time.

"Pay per visit"?

I mean i pay a drink for a euro with a credit card. Whats the big business behind 'pay per visit'?

The clearest example is news articles. I won't pay 1 euro to read one, but I would pay 1 cent, if I had a system that could facilitate that.

I work for a company that has tried to make that happen, but there simply hasn't been enough people to do that, or enough publishers who want to go down that road. They prefer the predictable income.

To be frank: It's bloggers who don't want to run ads but think they are entitled to an income from their blogs, despite the fact that they know nobody will pay a subscription for the same content.

Substack seems to prove there is an audience for some blogger out there that's willing to pay money. Whether there's enough market for that on the open Internet remains to be seen.

The earnings distribution on Substack is almost certainly the same as on e.g. onlyfans: a small number of high-profile writers earn big bucks, a slightly-larger number of creators actually earn decent money but not enough to live on, and the vast majority essentially make nothing at all.

How is that different than any other human endeavor? Not everybody that fancies themselves a writer is going to have the skill to draw an audience. Just because a few heavy hitters earn the most revenue doesn't mean the model is broken. That is just the way humans are for any given skill.

>How is that different than any other human endeavor?

I don't think I understand what you're getting at. Unionized factory workers all get paid the same amount, modulo seniority and other factors, and there is no steep income gradient among auto workers because of this. Is that not a "human endeavor"?

>Just because a few heavy hitters earn the most revenue doesn't mean the model is broken.

The model is broken because the vast majority of blogs are trash. The writers are simply not entitled to be paid by the pageload, because the content is not worth paying for. The large earners are the exception that proves the rule.

Then people will just choose not to visit? What exactly is your objection?

My objection is that x402 expects that if I click on a random link from HN, I'll end up paying.

Fuck that noise. I'm not paying before I have even had a chance to see what the content is.

I would expect a content preview of some kind the same way they do paywalls now, except the way you resolve the paywall is via micro-payments instead of a subscription.

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