# Announcing the Monetization Gateway: charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

_Friday, July 17, 2026 at 8:00 AM EDT · Infrastructure · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

![Announcing the Monetization Gateway: charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402 — Primary](https://blog.cloudflare.com/_emdash/api/media/file/01KWW2Q3Q9KN49NJGFWRJF35PR.png)

Cloudflare announced the Monetization Gateway, an engine designed to let customers charge for any asset protected by its network, including web pages, datasets, APIs, and MCP tools. The company said the gateway provides a single control plane to manage payment policies and access controls while protecting origin servers from high payment volumes by handling verification and enforcement at the edge. At launch, payments will settle in stablecoins over x402, an open protocol developed with a coalition of more than 25 industry leaders via the x402 Foundation. Cloudflare said the evolving business model of the web requires usage-based pricing as AI agents become dominant internet users. The company said agents do not view ads or maintain subscriptions, and that AI crawlers already request content hundreds to tens of thousands of times per human visitor. Cloudflare said the gateway will allow customers to write rules using expressions similar to existing Cloudflare rules to decide which traffic must pay. The company said the metering, payment exchange, and settlement move off the origin, eliminating the need to onboard buyers or build a billing system. Cloudflare said x402 uses the 402 Payment Required status code, enabling peer-to-peer settlement with sub-second speeds and negligible fees. The company said the protocol adds almost no overhead, allowing payments down to fractions of a cent.

## Sources

- [blog.cloudflare.com](https://blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway/)

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Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/tcC649DvbaesxlJDiL0KtY
Retrieved: 2026-07-17T18:28:38.325Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)