This is the dream of microtransactions and agents-paying-for-access that so many people have always wanted. It was never going to be implemented on existing payment rails so it would have to be something like this. I can't wait to see it in play somewhere because I am increasingly annoyed that I have to own API keys on various platforms etc. etc.
I just want my agent to make decisions and spend a limited amount of money (this is on me to cover) just like a human agent can.
If we get the other promise of "read this news but pay a few cents for it" that would be incredible too. Very excited for this new thing.
Thank you for the kind words! I’m a PM on the team that is building this. I’ve believed in microtransactions for over a decade and hope that we can finally bring them to life.
Proper spend delegation and permissions is a big focus of ours - it’s great to let your agent have discretion, as long as the damage from going off course is limited. Definitely want people to feel comfortable experimenting with emerging tech
Feel free to email me at (my username)@(my company) if you have any feature requests or things you’d like to see
first video games, then phone apps, and now finally the web. the micro transactionification of everything is complete! what a wonderful world we live in. just know people will remember your role you played in this, and if you think history is going to look at you kindly you have a very very rude awakening comming
I remember feeding arcade machines coin after coin, buying magazines and newspapers, and paying to see a movie. Those aren't all microtransactions but they are direct purchase -> consume content.
So is the rise of microtransactions mostly history repeating itself? There are nuances but web microtransactions feel a lot more like putting a quarter in to an arcade machine than the iap for phone apps.
this isnt putting a quarter in a machine. thats what we already have today. this is making the pinball game free but now you have to pay 1 cent every time you hit paddle button.
> this isnt putting a quarter in a machine. thats what we already have today.
What have I missed where I can, today, feasibly pay $0.25 at a time, online, regardless of other factors such as privacy, without putting down a larger balance at a time from which $0.25 is deducted?
This is an attempt to fix the currently broken payment system for the web that has caused a lot of the problems we face: clickbait, paywalls, requiring account signup, ad bloat, personal info collection, etc.
It would enable informational sites to fund themselves with small anonymous payments per article instead of squeezing ad revenue and personal data out of their customers.
Incumbents will hopefully be disrupted by this enabling more independent authors to actually make a living.
if i made a list of the worst possible solutions the problems you just listed number one on that list is this idea. if you think for a second that this will solve even ONE of those problems i have a bridge to sell you
clickbait: the revenue per click is going to go up thus driving even more incentive to produce clickbait titles with no real content (hey they have already paid by the time they find out its not real but o well). also enter the age of AI agent clickbait designed specifically to entice them. you just made the existing problem worse and created a new one
paywalls: well yeah, it makes the paywall go away, by paying, just like you could today
not collecting personal info: yeah other than the ledger of every single article you’ve ever clicked and paid for
account signups: you think cloudflare will be the only one in the game? welcome to a world of 50 different micropayment wallets you have to maintain and keep funded or you wont be able to browse the internet
Do you have any plans on mitigating the privacy consequences of microtransactions? I'm fine with paying for (some) content, but I'd prefer if there weren't some companies using that information to manipulate me or the more impressionable members of our society.
I think web servers monetizing any user identifiers possible should be assumed by this point in the web's evolution, and precluded to the extent possible at the protocol level.
No one is going to say "Oh, we've got micro-transaction revenue now, let's do away with ad tracking." They're going to say "Great, now we have both streams of revenue."
If Cloudflare et al. are stepping into the middle of the transactions, I'd much rather scope my identity leakage to only them than everyone running a web server.
Please tell me this will be IPv6 only or at least IPv6 first! Or allow differentiated pricing so IPv4 calls can be made more expensive. CF, as much as I have issues with the constant CAPTCHAS I run into and blocking my Hurricane Electric tunnel every so often, is in a unique position to get us past having to support the legacy internet protocol.
A dream for some, a nightmare for others. People locked out from much of the Internet because they don't have enough money. Of course, the prices would usually be set at whatever maximises revenue, just check out scientific journal publishing.
Advertising and all the anti-patterns it incentivizes are worse.If the payments are very low and frictionless this could be very good for the internet - as long as Cloudflare is only the first and not the only.
in no world is advertising worse. 0. none. you’re utterly delusional as the people pushing this are thinking anyone is going to pay for their garbage content behind 10cent micro transactions
> no world is advertising worse. 0. none. you’re utterly delusional as the people pushing this are thinking anyone is going to pay for their garbage content behind 10cent micro transactions
The current political situation we find ourselves in is partly due to the destruction of real journalism caused because people won’t pay for timely and accurate news. Advertising perverts incentives; I need you entertained - not informed - to make money…
> I don't pay for news today. I won't pay for news tomorrow. And so ads are the only way they will make money from me, even though I block them.
So you're going to be the problem no matter what happens.
I block a lot of ads but I also pay monthly to a lot of creators through Patreon so I don't feel guilty about blocking ads on youtube. I also pay monthly for a few news sites but not most because I read an article or two at most there per year (lots of random links from friends ... etc, almost always to local / regional news).
Microtransactions are _exactly_ what those guys need. The "please give us $10/month!" banner on the regional news site is not worth it for me, they're loosing out because i'm not going to fiddle with adblocker for just this one visit. I'd pay $0.30 to support them and not be guilty about it.
o got it so journalism is dying because no one will pay for it - so your solution is to lock the entire internet behind a paywall so everything else can die to? or are you suggesting that charging people to read news is the solution to the problem of people not being willing to pay for news?
Journalism is losing to "free" "news" sites. Those need to produce cheap, clickbait slop to be able to function.
There is no Spotify for press so the only other good solution is having microtransactions - paying only for articles you want to see, from any provider you want. Currently you must subscribe even if you want to read single article so the very few that buy the press are usually limited to single news source.
yes, because they are free. and those sites will continue to win all of those people just like they do today. and paid journalism will keep losing, and in fact will suffer more. i pay subscriptions to news sites that i deem trustworthy and reliable and if anyone of them switch from a subscription model to this pay per api call scheme they will never see a dime from me again. so the net accomplishment here is an internet wide paywall and those who this was supposed to help are further hurt. best part is 1) this shit will never happen because its such an obviously terrible idea
2) we dont have to argue! see 1 - this will never happen but if by some miracle it does all i have to do is wait and say “told ya so” because the shitty outcome is 100% guaranteed
Conversely this has the potential to unlock the internet. How often have you clicked a paywalled link on HN and moved on because you don't want to go through the hassle and pay $20 to read an article? If you could be frictionlessly billed 10c to read the article instead, wouldn't you be more willing?
I'm actually OK with paying a fair price for the content I consume, I just don't want to be paying hundreds of subscriptions for websites that I might only visit twice a year.
Presumably, nobody would offer the 10c per page unless they were making more than the $20 / month or whatever previously. So people will be paying more. Then add all the sites that currently just get what they can with advertising, and now they can become pay-per-view.
The $20/month model is exclusionary as you are excluding people who are not interested in regularly reading a single newspaper. Pay-per-page is more reasonable. I have rarely paid for news subscription (partly because I find news here which comes from many sources). Obviously, I am not going to pay hundreds in subscriptions, so I am essentially paying $0.
With this, I can see myself paying $20-30/month (less than my coffee spend). That's money that was previously unlocked. Also, being able to pay some random writer/journalist outside the mega-news-corps, has a special feel to it and this gives me the option to do that.
Random writer/journalists outside the mega-news-corps sometimes have a page for donations. You could donate to one once per month if you want to get rid of your $20-30.
They have to get almost 200 more conversions to make up for the single subscriber. Given a lot of these services offer $1 entry subscriptions and people still bounce it's unlikely you'll have a mass market excited to pay $0.10 everytime they want to read an article to make up for the person paying $20 to read a handful everyday.
Microtransactions have existed in a bunch of forms over the past 20 years and always fail to find take up because the mental load in deciding to pay or not is higher than the value receive.
Maybe ideal for agents but how many people are going to trust their agents with enough of a balance.
A $1 entry subscription where you have to type your name and credit card and submit and wait and now you have a relationship to manage, is infinitely more expensive than a 10 cent, automatic, non-recurring, one-time, no cancelation needed, pseudonomous, microtransaction.
Which isn't private. Wallet ID 123 buys a 10c article from Leftist Newspaper A and one from Leftist Newspaper B. Leftist Newspaper A and B, being businesses, sell the information that Wallet ID 123 purchased an article to Data Broker A. Data Broker A correlates all purchases Wallet ID 123 has ever made and with a high degree of accuracy identifies who they are and their political affliation. Data Broker A sells this profile to anyone who asks for it, including far right governments who might be interested in throwing people out of helicopters based on their political affiliation. Unless you use Monero, this will happen, and Monero will obviously not be used.
Yes, 90% of people are careless and already give away this information right now. But you're suggesting closing the door on the rest who care to be able to protect themselves while still being able to use the internet, and cementing that nobody will ever have privacy for the rest of their lives, when we should be making an effort to make it harder to identify people, not easier.
In what way is it even an improvement??? When has anyone ever said "yeah, actually, I love microtransactions!" Why is the final death of the free internet a good thing? Do you believe that by paying microtransactions you'll be exempt from the ads and spying, rather than simply being doubledipped?
What free internet? You always pay with your time and also usually with lots of tracking and ads.
AI can easily strip any ads for fractions of a cent. AI bots can be tracked - Open Router (or equivalent) will probably don't mind. That is the point of the article - ad and tracker infested webpages will soon be struggling, and some other forms of monetization needs to come.
Right but it means I can go read a bunch of content right away vs microtransactions where literally every click becomes a case of me deciding if it's worth 10c. That is exhausting.
Also if they are handling payments at some point you're going to be forming that relationship or they are going to get shut down for money laundering very quickly.
This is exhausting only if you don't value your time (which is the biggest cost when reading the news). People will learn how to make such decisions quickly.
Nope, not going to happen. Any per use micro transaction isn't going to work. If anything it's going to require a huge amount of workarounds to get the content for free via alternative means
If the choice is between micro-transactions and ad-driven content (ads -> engagement maximization -> sensationalization + enshittification -> social and industrial decay), I'll take the former.
Remember: from a business's perspective, advertising has positive ROI. Which means you as the consumer pay for it anyway. No ad supported service is free.
I just want my agent to make decisions and spend a limited amount of money (this is on me to cover) just like a human agent can.
If we get the other promise of "read this news but pay a few cents for it" that would be incredible too. Very excited for this new thing.