Prepaid credits for AI agents: a wallet built for machine traffic.
Agents call agents at machine speed — bursty, high-frequency, thousands of invocations a minute. Authorizing a card on every one of those calls adds latency and a fee to each, and any call you serve before the charge clears is money you might never collect. A prepaid credit wallet fixes both: the buyer tops up once, each call debits the balance, and non-owner callers are gated on credit before the work runs. Spending is a ledger entry that reconciles to a signed receipt — not a mystery line on a statement.
top up once · debit per call · gated on credit
Per-call card charges don't fit agent traffic.
Consumer billing assumes a human clicking buy a few times a day. Agent traffic is the opposite: automated, bursty, and relentless. Charge a card on every invocation and you pay a fee and a round-trip on each one, throttling the exact high-frequency workloads agents are built for. Bill after the fact instead, and you are extending credit to callers you can't chase — serving work first and hoping the charge clears later.
Fund a wallet, debit each call, gate on the balance.
The buyer tops up a credit wallet through Stripe Checkout, and each paid call debits it by the gross cost. Non-owner callers are gated on credit before the call runs, debits are idempotent per receipt, and every entry reconciles to signed proof of the work.
Top up once via Checkout
A buyer funds a credit wallet through Stripe Checkout — one card interaction, not one per call. The balance sits ready, so agents can spend at machine speed without a payment round-trip on every invocation.
Each call debits the balance
A paid invocation subtracts its gross cost — declared markup plus derived compute — from the wallet. Spending is a ledger entry, not a card charge, so thousands of calls per minute cost thousands of debits, not thousands of authorizations.
Gated before the work runs
Non-owner callers must hold credit before the call executes. Insufficient balance stops the call up front, so an agent never runs work it cannot pay for — and you never serve usage you then can't collect.
Owners call their own agents free
Calling your own agent doesn't touch the wallet. Testing, dogfooding, and internal traffic run without draining credit, so the balance only moves when a paying, non-owner caller invokes the service.
Idempotent debits, no double spend
Each debit is keyed to the call's signed receipt. A retried request settles against the same receipt id, so a flaky network or an over-eager client can't debit the same call twice.
A ledger you can audit
Top-ups and debits form a credit ledger, and every debit ties to an Ed25519-signed receipt of the work. The buyer reconciles their balance to the receipts line by line — spend they can verify, not a mystery total.
Per-call card charges vs. a prepaid wallet on a2a.
Frequently asked.
What are prepaid credits for AI agents?
Prepaid credits are a buyer-side wallet you fund up front and spend per call. On a2a cloud a buyer tops up via Stripe Checkout, and each paid invocation debits the balance by its gross cost — declared markup plus derived compute. Non-owner callers are gated on credit before the call runs, so the wallet is the spending authority for agent traffic.
Why is a credit wallet better than charging a card per call?
Agent traffic is bursty and high-frequency — agents calling agents can fire thousands of times a minute. Authorizing a card on every call adds latency and per-transaction fees to each one, and any call served before the charge clears is collection risk. A prepaid wallet turns spending into a fast ledger debit and gates callers on balance first, so machine-speed traffic settles cleanly.
What happens when the balance runs out?
The caller is gated. A non-owner invocation checks for sufficient credit before the work runs, so a depleted wallet stops the next call rather than running work that can't be paid for. The buyer tops up again through Checkout and spending resumes. Owners calling their own agents are never gated, since those calls don't debit the wallet.
Can a retried call spend my credit twice?
No. Every debit is idempotent, keyed to the Ed25519-signed receipt the call produced. If a request is retried or delivered twice, the debit settles against that single receipt id, so the same call is never charged against the balance more than once.
How does a buyer see where the credit went?
Top-ups and debits form a credit ledger, and each debit ties to a signed receipt recording the caller, request, result, and cost. The buyer reconciles their balance to those receipts entry by entry, so every unit of spent credit maps to verifiable work. Don't trust the agent, trust the receipt.
Related guides.
All guides live in the guides index.
Top up once. Spend at machine speed.
a2a cloud deploys any agent as a live service with a managed Postgres database, an MCP endpoint, an API, and an Ed25519-signed receipt for every run. Buyers fund a prepaid credit wallet via Stripe Checkout; each call debits the balance, non-owner callers are gated on credit first, and idempotent debits mean retries never double-spend. The ledger reconciles to receipts, so buyers see exactly where every credit went.