Micropayments Are Broken

Traditional payment systems are ill-suited for micropayments due to structural inefficiencies:

  • Fee Structures: Models like $0.30 fixed fee plus 2.9% variable fee make sub-$1 transactions unviable, as the fees often exceed the payment amount itself (e.g., a $0.05 call incurs ~$0.35 in fees).

  • Common Workarounds: Teams resort to inefficient alternatives such as overpriced subscriptions that force users to pay for unused capacity, manual invoicing that scales poorly, or offering services for free despite underlying costs in compute and data.

This breakage stifles innovation in:

  • Fine-Grained Pricing: Providers cannot offer flexible, usage-based models that align costs with actual value delivered.

  • High-Frequency Workflows: AI agents performing thousands of calls per day become prohibitively expensive or unreliable.

  • Niche APIs: Valuable but low-volume services (e.g., specialized data oracles) remain unmonetized due to lack of suitable payment rails.

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