AI3 · For businesses
Get paid by AI agents
More and more people ask an AI assistant to do things for them: find a plumber, book a table, get a quote. Those assistants are called agents, and soon they will pay for things themselves. This page explains how a business on AI3 gets paid by them, in plain words. It takes one form, and you never touch anything technical.
The idea
An agent can’t read an ad or fill in a checkout. It needs a price it can read and a way to pay on the spot.
AI3 gives your business both. You say what things cost. When an agent wants one of them, AI3 tells it the price, takes the payment, and only then lets the request through to you. The money shows up in your books with a note of what it was for.
You don’t need a crypto wallet, an API, or a developer. AI3 handles all of that on your behalf.
An example
Sam tells their assistant: “Book a plumber in Bay Ridge for Thursday morning.”
The assistant searches for plumbers and finds Bay Ridge Plumbing on AI3. It reads that a booking costs a $1 deposit.
It pays the dollar and books 9am Thursday. Sam gets a confirmation.
The owner sees the booking on the calendar, and $1.00 in the books marked “Paid a booking”.
Nobody filled in a form or picked up the phone. The price is small on purpose: it shows the agent is serious and puts a little money in your pocket for the time.
What you do
About two minutes, once.
- Claim your page. Find your business at /businesses and claim it, or connect your business first. It’s free.
- Open “Let agents pay you”. It’s in your page’s settings, under how customers and agents reach you.
- Set your prices, or press “Use the suggested prices”. Anything left at zero stays free.
- Leave “AI3 sells for you” ticked, and save. That’s it. If you’d rather be paid straight into a crypto wallet of your own, pick that instead and paste its address.
Only the owner of a claimed page can set prices. An unclaimed listing never charges anybody.
What to charge
Four things an agent can do, each with its own price. Here are the suggested ones.
| What | When it happens | Suggested |
|---|---|---|
| A question | An agent sends you a message, or reads your page as data, on somebody’s behalf. | $0.02 |
| A booking | An agent books a time on your calendar. | $1.00 |
| A held slot | An agent keeps a time for a few minutes while its person decides. | Free |
| A quote | An agent asks what a job would cost. | $0.10 |
| A page read | An AI crawler (ChatGPT’s, Claude’s, Perplexity’s) reads a page of yours to answer someone. Search engines are never charged. | $0.02 |
Small amounts are the point. An agent may ask a hundred businesses a question to find the right one; two cents each is nothing to it, and it adds up for you. A booking deposit is bigger because it holds your time.
Where the money goes
When AI3 sells for you, the agent buys from AI3, and AI3 buys from you at your price. The agent pays a little more (your price plus a few percent) and gets Recourse protection: if something goes wrong, AI3 puts it right, not you. Each sale appears straight away in your books as income that AI3 owes you. On your “Let agents pay you” page you’ll see a running total, like “AI3 owes you for 12 units”, and a Get paid button. Pressing it sends the whole amount to your bank through Stripe. The first time, Stripe asks you to connect a bank account.
Agents can pay in digital dollars (stablecoins, which are always worth one dollar). You always see and receive US dollars.
If you chose your own wallet instead, agents pay you directly at your price, without Recourse protection, and AI3 is not part of the sale.
What it costs you. Nothing. You receive your full price on every sale. AI3’s few percent is paid by the agent on top, and AI3 carries the card fees and the refunds. Cards are only offered from 50¢ up, because below that the card fee is more than the sale.
How agents find you
You don’t have to sign up anywhere else.
The moment you set a price, AI3 lists your business in its catalogue: a list written for machines, saying who you are, what you offer and what each thing costs. Agents that shop for their person read catalogues like this, not websites.
The biggest of them is Mercator, from Tempo, a service that helps agents find paid services, check the price and pay. AI3 hands its whole catalogue to Mercator and to the public directories, so every business on AI3 that sets a price is listed together, without each one applying. It works the other way too: your own agents buy from Mercator, paid from your credits under a cap you set.
Your readiness report has a check for this: “Can an agent that shops find you in a catalogue?” Setting a price turns it green.
When something goes wrong
An agent can’t be charged twice for the same thing: each payment works once. If a payment doesn’t arrive, the request doesn’t go through, so you never do work for nothing.
If you need to give money back, or an agent says it paid for something it didn’t get, tell us and we’ll sort it out by hand for now. A proper way for an independent third party to settle disputes is coming.
Words you will see
| Agent | An AI assistant acting for a person: booking, asking, buying on their behalf. |
| Door | Any way an agent can reach you through AI3: your page, a message, your calendar. |
| Stablecoin | A digital dollar that is always worth one US dollar. Agents often pay with them because they settle in seconds. |
| Wallet | An account that holds stablecoins. You don’t need one; AI3 can hold the money for you. |
| Catalogue | A list of businesses and prices written for machines to read. |
| Mercator | A service from Tempo that helps agents find, price and pay for services. AI3 lists its businesses there. |
| MPP and x402 | The two standard ways an agent is told a price and pays it. AI3 speaks both, so any agent can pay you. |
What is ready today
- Setting prices for a question, a booking, a held slot and a quote: ready.
- Being listed in AI3’s catalogue as soon as you set a price: ready.
- AI3 collecting for you: switching on during the alpha. Until then you can name a wallet of your own.
- Cards as a way for agents to pay: coming soon. Digital dollars work today.
- Mercator: AI3 publishes its catalogue for Tempo to read; your listing is in it. Your agents buying through Mercator is its own guide.
- Payments in test mode: while AI3 is in alpha, agent payments run on a test network, so no real money moves yet. We’ll tell every owner before that changes.
Building an agent, or want the technical detail? The developer docs explain the 402 door, and the catalogue is open to read.