The active development of machine payments began about a year ago with the introduction of Coinbase’s x402 protocol.
Since then, most of the attention has been focused on AI agents. The main narrative has been about how to give agents a wallet, how to monetize them, how to provide access to paid resources, and how to make the agent economy truly functional.
AI agents are rapidly gaining traction and will likely remain a significant part of the internet economy for years to come. For now, they are the primary users of machine payments.
But this is a very narrow view of what these technologies can actually enable.
Machine payments have the potential to change how people pay for online services, how those services are monetized, and how users interact with subscription-based products.
In this article, I want to explore how the subscription model works today and what might change in the future.
How Online Subscriptions Work Today
Most SaaS products follow a similar pricing model: several plans with a fixed monthly fee. Usage-based pricing exists, but it is less common and typically limited to services where resource consumption can be measured easily.
This approach is convenient for companies, but it also creates limitations for users.
If you already have five subscriptions costing $20 per month each, you’re unlikely to sign up for a sixth one from an unknown startup. More often than not, you’ll choose a larger and more established service.
That said, the subscription model comes with several characteristics worth noting.
The cost of entry.
There are countless useful SaaS products on the internet that many users will never try. The free trial may be too short, or paying $20 per month for a single feature simply doesn’t feel worth it.
Underutilization.
Users often get only $1–5 of value from a subscription that costs $20 per month. The rest goes unused.
Distorted perception of spending.
Research by CR Research shows that users underestimate their subscription expenses by a factor of 2.5 on average.
Forgotten subscriptions.
A separate study by AEA confirms that people regularly continue paying for services they no longer use.
Yet the market keeps growing.
According to Grand View Research, the subscription economy reached $492 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2033 — an increase of roughly $100 billion per year.
In short, the situation looks like this.
Subscriptions are beneficial for companies because they provide:
- predictable revenue;
- simpler business planning;
- stable income even from low-engagement users.
For users, there are several drawbacks:
- every new service requires another subscription;
- it is difficult to pay only for the functionality you actually need;
- costs accumulate over time;
- many subscriptions are forgotten or only partially used.
Subscriptions work well for SaaS products, but they are a poor fit for small, occasional tasks.
What Machine Payments Change
Machine payments allow users to pay for specific requests rather than full access to a vendor’s resources. Protocols such as x402, MPP, and APP operate at the HTTP request level — a technical rather than commercial layer of interaction.
This fundamentally changes the relationship between users and services and opens up entirely new possibilities.
Pay only for what you use.
Instead of a fixed monthly fee, users pay for actual usage. Resource consumption becomes transparent for both users and service providers.
Use more services.
A single $20 subscription to one vendor can become $3–5 spread across four or five specialized services. This redistribution creates opportunities for high-quality niche products that might otherwise struggle to compete against larger platforms.
When users no longer need to commit to a separate subscription for every tool, they can choose solutions based on the task at hand.
There is no need to decide whether a monthly or annual plan is worth it. You simply use the services you need.
Greater control over spending.
Users can set spending limits, block overly expensive operations, or restrict services that generate excessive requests.
At the same time, they avoid paying for resources they never use.
No registrations required.
Most services require accounts primarily to identify users and associate usage with billing.
With machine payments, this is not always necessary. Registration would remain only where it provides real value.
For users, this would be far more convenient than leaving an email address on every website they encounter.
For many services, the choice may become clear: collect user data and risk losing potential customers, or provide the service immediately and rely on users returning organically.
Why Pay-Per-Use Didn’t Take Off Earlier
Machine payments are essentially micropayments, often worth less than a cent. Even a single API request paid on demand is a micropayment.
Traditional financial infrastructure is not designed for this. Interbank transactions processed through networks such as Visa and Mastercard involve significant overhead, making micropayments economically impractical.
Micropayments can work within a single company or bank, where money moves between accounts inside the same system. However, once interbank settlement is involved, the economics become far less attractive.
Blockchain changed that.
Networks such as Solana and Base can process transactions quickly and with minimal fees.
The rise of stablecoins and the ability to pay fees using stablecoins have made micropayments cheap enough to support real-world products.
This is precisely why machine payment protocols such as x402, MPP, and APP emerged now rather than earlier, opening up new opportunities for micropayment-based services.
A New User Experience
For machine payments to reach mainstream users, they need to be wrapped in simple and intuitive tools.
Traditional online payments already have this layer in the form of Apple Pay, Google Pay, and online banking apps. You connect a card, click once, and the purchase is complete.
Micropayments require a different approach. Users will not approve every request manually. Automatic payments, spending limits, and seamless fund management are essential. Integrating blockchain infrastructure also adds complexity for people who have never used a crypto wallet.
This is why new tools must emerge alongside machine payment protocols to handle that complexity on behalf of users.
Such a tool should allow users to:
- set daily and monthly spending limits;
- configure automatic payments below a certain threshold;
- maintain allowlists and blocklists of services;
- manually approve only expensive operations;
- automatically move funds across networks when necessary.
In that model, users do not subscribe to five different services. Instead, they allocate a budget to a category of tasks.
With subscriptions, users trust each service individually.
With machine payments, users trust their wallet and the rules they have configured.
This could be implemented as additional functionality in existing wallets such as MetaMask or Rabby, or as entirely new applications that provide analytics, spending controls, and transaction history.
Most importantly, mainstream users should not have to think about blockchains or payment protocols.
They should only see something like:
This request costs $0.10. Automatically approve payments up to $5 per month?
Why This Benefits Smaller Players
The subscription model works well for large platforms. Users already pay for access to a broad set of features, and companies do not necessarily need those features to be used every day.
Smaller services face a tougher challenge. Even if they solve a specific problem better than anyone else, users are rarely willing to pay for yet another subscription.
But if that service costs $0.005, $0.02, or $1 per result, the barrier nearly disappears.
Today, a user might choose a single AI platform for $20 per month.
In the future, they could use:
- one service for translation;
- another for PDF analysis;
- a third for image generation;
- a fourth for information retrieval;
- a fifth for code review.
And pay each one only for actual usage.
At the same time, each specialized service may perform its task better than a general-purpose platform trying to do everything.
Machine payments allow specialized products to compete not for subscriptions, but for the quality of the result they deliver.
Large Platforms Will Have to Adapt
Today, the subscription model benefits large platforms because it provides predictable revenue and reduces uncertainty.
But if users become accustomed to paying for actual usage, and smaller specialized products begin competing successfully in individual categories, large players will have to adapt.
They will face a choice: lose part of their user base or introduce more flexible pricing models alongside subscriptions.
Over time, the market may shift toward models where users pay for outcomes rather than simply for access.
Risks
Machine payments come with their own limitations and risks.
Among the most important are:
- Fear of automatic payments. Users worry about losing control over their spending.
- Dishonest vendors. Without reliable spending controls, some services may be tempted to generate unnecessary requests without the user’s knowledge.
- Taxes and accounting. Tracking hundreds of micropayments is not a trivial task.
- Privacy. Who can see what users are paying for and how much they spend?
- User experience. If every action requires confirmation, the experience becomes worse than a traditional subscription.
For this reason, new micropayment tools must be designed with these limitations in mind. Protocols such as x402, MPP, and APP provide the technical foundation, but the user experience built on top of them still needs to be created.
Conclusion
Machine payments should not turn the internet into a taximeter.
Their purpose is to give users more flexibility and control while providing companies with new ways to monetize their products.
The future of online payments is not a world without subscriptions.
It is a world where subscriptions are no longer the only way to monetize digital products.
AI agents will likely become the first major market for machine payments.
But the real transformation will begin when ordinary users can work with dozens of specialized services — without registrations, without pricing plans, and without the risk of forgotten subscriptions — simply by paying for specific actions within clearly defined spending limits.