Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
wmf | on: Brave Search API now accepts agentic payments via the x402 protocol
Humans hate micropayments but maybe it will be hidden somehow.
NiloCK | parent | next
We hate surfaced micropayments. Flipping a lightswitch is a micropayment in so far as it comes due as part of your electricity bill, but we ignore it because it doesn't come with a dedicated payment-authorization step.

If there is a message-to-the-medium of LLMs and the agentic internet era, it's commodification. More digital services are going to converge on metered billing, with incremental usage being extremely cheap - like the lightswitch, cheap enough to be implemented without the explicit payment-auth step on each minor decision.

Software and users will likely start setting some sorts of policy limits and alerting systems for different categories of spending.

kuboble | parent | next
People only hate the inconvenience of existing micro payments.

The idea of paying for usage is actually very appealing.

howunfortunate | root | parent
This is not true. The psychology of positive and negative events suggests that to optimize your happiness, you should "lump" negative things and "split" positive things.

People do this intuitively with payments (negative). They'll buy a timeshare or a boat (expensive, "lump" cost) when it would be much cheaper on net to stay at resorts or rent a boat and pay by usage.

They'll pay for subscriptions (automatic payments) rather than pay per experience. Many people will pay $20/mo for Netflix, watch it twice a month, but would never rent movies for $3 on Amazon.

They'll pay a big premium for "unlimited" data plans when this actually makes little sense for anyone vs. paying by usage.

armchairhacker | root | parent | next
IMO micropayments should be so small that people don’t even account for them in expenses. It costs almost nothing for a website to serve a single request, hosting costs almost nothing.

There’s no reason a big host can’t be 100% free, entirely relying on user payments for requests to pay for electricity and new servers (where each request is almost free), a few engineers and security guards to physically install, maintain, and monitor the servers (funded by excess or donations).

IanCal | root | parent | next
It’s the difference between filling up your tank and having to approve every mile to me. A fund I top up and costs go to 0 when I’m not using it is attractive, much more so than a fixed charge and subscription.
brabel | root | parent | next
Shit . I feel dumb now.
_ink_ | parent | next
I am human and I'd love to just pay a small fee to read an article instead of using a russian proxy site to avoid needing 45 abos per month.
war-is-peace | parent | next
anyone using an llm is hard stuck in token micropayments regardless, i doubt one more will make a significant difference to them if it is integrated into pricing well enough
utopiah | parent | next
Yet everybody relying on infrastructure, like electricity, water, gas, etc, is familiar with a meter, paying upfront based on an estimation of consumption, then getting money back.

One could easily imagine that, or that your AI provider, being ChatGPT, Anthropic or Cursor or even neo clouds where you run your own compute on, provide a weekly or monthly aggregated payment not just for computes but for paid traffic. They have the balance sheet (sigh) to front it.

You'd pay $20 for compute and $8.7896813 for traffic or you'd have a "budget" of $10 of traffic included in your $30 bundle.

I think customers would accept that if explain that otherwise their queries wouldn't be as nice and also that the providers of content would get a share.

mihaaly | parent
I am not a human then.