Let your AI agent pay for 20,000+ Apify Actors with x402
The value of AI agents is proportional to the size of tasks they can handle without human input. The longer and more complex the job, the more valuable an agent becomes. And to complete ever-longer jobs, agents will need a budget to autonomously discover and pay for the tools that they need on their own, without human-in-the-loop approvals. AI agents can call tools, but paying for those tools is still awkward.<br>The bottleneck isn't the API key itself; it's the human workflow around it: creating accounts, attaching billing, issuing and storing credentials, rotating secrets, and wiring them into the runtime environment. Agentic payments are an emerging answer to this, and the x402 protocol is the most promising implementation (based on real transaction volume).<br>With x402, the server can declare a payment requirement at request time, and the client can satisfy it automatically. Originally built by Coinbase and now an open source protocol governed under the Linux Foundation, x402 pairs naturally with the Model Context Protocol (MCP): a tool-using client can inspect MCP tool metadata, detect a payment requirement, authorize a supported payment, and retry the call automatically.<br>Until now, autonomous agents could buy services from a pool of roughly 2,000 endpoints available on x402. As of today, we're bringing more than 20,000 Actors from our marketplace of web automation tools into the x402 ecosystem. That's roughly 10x more tools than the protocol had before. In practice, this means an agent can pay for Apify web data and automation tools using USDC on the Base blockchain (with support for more protocols and stablecoins coming soon) instead of relying on a pre-provisioned API key.<br>Paying for Actors over x402<br>Basically, any Apify Actor can be paid for and run in as little as a single HTTP request. Your agent calls the Actor API endpoint, gets back an HTTP 402 with the available payment schemes and price. The agent's wallet signs the payment, and the Actor runs. The whole exchange happens at the HTTP layer, exactly as the protocol intends.<br>The easiest way to get started is to use Coinbase's Agentic Wallet CLI that handles the payment authorization in an agent-native way. It reads the 402 challenge and signs with its on-chain wallet, so the agent can execute the Actor run and retrieve data. It works best in agent runtimes that can execute shell commands and persist local state (such as Claude Code, Codex, Droid, OpenCode, or other coding agents).
Install the drop-in agent skill once, then just ask your coding agent for the data you want. It handles the wallet, the x402 payment, and the Actor run.<br># Give your agent a Coinbase wallet<br>npx awal auth login you@email.com<br>npx awal auth verify # the wallet is created on first auth<br>npx awal show # fund it with USDC on Base via Coinbase Onramp<br># Alternatively you can use npx awal address to view wallet funding address and then npx awal balance to check the wallet balance
# Install the "Get started" skill to use `awal` CLI<br>npx skills add apify/awesome-skills --skill apify-x402-agentic-wallet
# Ask your agent<br>Use apify/instagram-profile-scraper to get the 3 latest posts from "natgeo", paying over x402 with USDC.Enabling x402 payments in MCP<br>To support the agentic payments workflow, we've also added x402 support directly to mcpc - a universal CLI client for MCP developed by Apify. mcpc is a CLI tool that maps MCP operations into commands that are intuitive for both humans and agents. It's also one of the first MCP clients to add support for x402, so agents can send payments to compatible MCP servers.<br>Setting up wallet funding with x402After the initial setup and wallet funding, the agent can pay for supported tool calls without per-service API key provisioning. For the full integration guide, see the Apify x402 docs.<br>Under the hood: The exact and upto settlement schemes<br>x402 originally only supported the exact payment scheme, which is useful for APIs with a fixed cost per request. But Apify Actors are used for batch operations, like web data collection, which can take variable time and cost. That means it's hard to know in advance how much the operation will cost. x402 now also has an upto scheme to help with this challenge, and Apify supports this, too.<br>The exact scheme, the only one in x402 v1, declares a fixed price up front, which is awkward for runs whose cost isn't known in advance. To support it anyway, Apify layers a prepaid-deposit and refund flow on top: the server requests a $1.00 prepaid deposit, the client signs an EIP-3009 TransferWithAuthorization, and any unused balance is refunded after the run.<br>The upto (allowance) scheme, from the x402 v2 specification, fits variable-cost work best, so it's the one we lead with. The client authorizes a maximum amount in the payment signature by signing a Permit2 permitWitnessTransferFrom, and the service charges only for what the run actually uses, anywhere from...