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whether the existing business finance tooling reaches down to per-call API spend at sat granularity
Not per-call for APIs because it makes no sense for a business process to pay per call. You'll want volume discounts if you're going to actually have a repeatable process, not pay peak price. But then, if you have a repeatable process, you often don't need the LLM on the hot path, or at least not much.
agents paying for API calls (data lookups, inference, paid MCP tools) .. The way you asked made me think you got something concrete in mind.
I haven't found anything worth even testing yet for this and inference is base layer. So I'm mostly interested to learn of all these amazing use-cases everyone keeps talking about, but unfortunately, no one seems to have anything concrete. Feels a bit like there's a lot of infra with no use-case to me at the moment. Maybe it will come though.
That's the most useful thing anyone's said to me on this. "Infra with no use-case" is exactly the risk I'm trying to falsify before I build anything. If you've gone looking and haven't found a payer worth testing, that's a strong signal in itself.
So let me flip the whole thing: forget the guardrails. Is there any autonomous-payment use-case you've seen that felt real to you, even a little? Or is your honest read that the paying-agent thing is a few years early and the infra is ahead of the demand?
I think the paying side is ahead of the offer side. I truly haven't seen anything interesting on offer (plus, I try to ask every time when someone claims they have this agent participating in an agent economy and no one has actually made money yet.)
So, in order to spend money, you need to make money. Right now, the only ones making money seem to be LLM resellers. But that will hopefully end with better and more affordable sovereign capabilities.
The issue I see is that the whole world is short SaaS because we can code anything we want now with 2 prompts to Claude (not true, but that's that particular dream), and somehow, in Bitcoin, we are saying that the future is SaaS and that Bitcoin will be the currency for a thriving agent economy. I feel a discrepancy between those two visions. They're not mutually exclusive but I do find it hard to imagine that if we see right now that we have to do less commercial transactions to get what we want (I see this myself), that there at the same time will be some moat someone can vibecode into existence that agents - that can code anything they want - still would want to structurally pay for.
Right, and that's exactly the layer I'd want for agents. The question is whether the existing business finance tooling reaches down to per-call API spend at sat granularity, or whether agents need their own thing.
Honest answer to your question: my own use case is still early. I'm not running a high-volume autonomous payer in production yet, which is exactly why I'm asking instead of assuming. What I have in mind is agents paying for API calls (data lookups, inference, paid MCP tools) over L402/x402, where each call is fractions of a cent but the volume is unbounded.
And you? The way you asked made me think you got something concrete in mind. Are you buying or selling API calls right now?