Daniel Saks
Chief Executive Officer
The global AI agent market is projected to reach $52.62 billion by the year 2030 and is projected to grow at a 46.3% CAGR, with 23% of organizations scaling gen AI use cases this year. Yet traditional billing systems struggle to handle the unique economics of AI workloads, where a single conversation may trigger hundreds of micro-activities with sub-cent costs. Selecting the right monetization platform directly impacts whether your AI agents generate profit or burn cash. This guide examines platforms that serve AI agent builders at different stages, starting with Nevermined's agent-native payment infrastructure that combines real-time metering, instant settlement, and protocol-level support for emerging standards like A2A, MCP, and x402.
Nevermined provides payments infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents, enabling usage-based billing, instant settlement, and agent-to-agent transactions. The platform serves as the financial rails for the emerging agentic economy, addressing fundamental billing challenges that traditional payment processors cannot handle for AI workloads.
Nevermined Pay delivers bank grade enterprise ready metering, compliance, and settlement so every model call turns into auditable revenue. The platform features ledger grade metering, a dynamic pricing engine, credits based settlement, 5x faster book closing, and margin recovery capabilities. For enterprise AI platforms and vendors, Nevermined Pay provides the infrastructure to operate at global scale with audit-ready transparency.
Nevermined ID provides universal agent identification through a unique wallet plus DID per agent that persists across networks, marketplaces, and environments. One lookup returns live metadata, pricing, and authorization rules. The system supports auto-discovery via Google's A2A protocol for instant agent connection.
Flex Credits operate as prepaid consumption-based units that align price to value, enable flexible scaling across users and departments, and provide predictable spend with real-time burn rate monitoring. Credits solve enterprise reluctance toward minimum commitments and give finance teams trackable recurring billing.
Valory cut deployment time of their payments and billing infrastructure for the Olas AI agent marketplace from 6 weeks to 6 hours using Nevermined, clawing back $1000s in engineering costs.
Best For: AI builders at any stage needing agent-to-agent autonomous payments, micropayment economics, and enterprise-grade metering. Ideal for teams building on emerging protocols who want to get started free without sacrificing scale capabilities.
Paid.ai focuses on helping AI developers understand and monetize their costs through detailed analytics and flexible billing models. The platform targets developers seeking visibility into LLM and API expenses.
Best For: Developers prioritizing cost analytics and margin tracking over transaction execution. Teams focused on understanding AI infrastructure costs before implementing full monetization.
Skyfire provides agent payment capabilities through wallet abstraction, enabling developers to fund agent wallets and control spending in real-time.
Best For: Teams needing fast setup for basic agent wallet functionality with crypto settlement. Suitable for projects prioritizing speed of initial implementation.
Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in 2024 and remains one of the largest global payment processors. The company has introduced new capabilities to address AI workloads, including the Agentic Commerce Protocol.
Best For: Companies with existing Stripe infrastructure processing higher-value transactions. Teams seeking the familiarity and global reach of an established payment processor.
Orb provides API-first usage-based billing used by Perplexity and Vercel. The platform focuses on developer-friendly invoicing for SaaS applications.
Best For: Developer-led SaaS companies with traditional usage-based billing needs. Teams seeking proven infrastructure for standard invoicing workflows.
Alguna, backed by Y Combinator, provides a no-code platform that enables finance and RevOps teams to manage AI billing without engineering resources.
Best For: Finance teams needing no-code control over billing configuration. Suitable for companies where RevOps drives billing decisions rather than engineering.
Chargebee has served thousands of companies globally since 2011, focusing on subscription lifecycle management and revenue recognition.
Best For: Traditional SaaS companies managing subscription lifecycles. Teams with established subscription models seeking mature revenue recognition features.
Zuora provides enterprise-grade quote-to-cash capabilities with Togai adding real-time metering functionality. The combined solution targets large enterprises with complex revenue requirements.
Best For: Large enterprises with complex revenue recognition requirements and substantial budgets. Companies with extensive compliance needs for traditional billing workflows.
Ready to monetize your AI agents with infrastructure built for autonomous commerce? Explore Nevermined's documentation to deploy in under 20 minutes, or contact the team for enterprise requirements.
AI agents trigger hundreds of micro-activities per interaction with sub-cent costs that traditional seat-based or subscription models cannot track profitably. A single conversation might involve multiple LLM calls, API requests, and tool invocations, each requiring real-time metering and margin calculation. Agent-native platforms like Nevermined handle per-token, per-call, and per-GPU-cycle pricing with guaranteed margin built in, while traditional billing systems require extensive custom development.
Nevermined uses tamper-evident metering where every usage record is signed and pushed to an append-only log at creation, making it immutable. The exact pricing rule is stamped onto each agent's usage credit, allowing developers, users, auditors, or agents to verify that usage totals match billed amounts per line-item. This zero-trust reconciliation model satisfies enterprise procurement teams requiring audit-ready transparency.
Yes, Nevermined provides a low-code SDK available in TypeScript and Python that works across the AI ecosystem. The platform supports emerging protocols like Google's A2A protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling standardized communication and discovery. Implementation takes under 20 minutes with detailed guidance available in the developer documentation.
Most successful AI agent businesses use a combination of models. Usage-based pricing covers infrastructure costs with per-token, per-API-call, or per-GPU-cycle charges, while outcome-based pricing charges for results achieved like completed calls or booked meetings. Value-based pricing captures a percentage of ROI generated, and Nevermined supports all three models allowing you to mix them to maximize revenue capture.
Flex Credits solve multiple problems by enabling developers to charge for micro-actions and reward successful outcomes. For users, credits provide predictable spend through prepayment with real-time burn rate monitoring. Credits can be reallocated across users, departments, or agents without renegotiating licenses, while finance teams get trackable recurring billing instead of complex sub-cent charge reconciliation.
As AI agents operate autonomously across networks and marketplaces, persistent identity becomes critical for payments, reputation, and authorization. Nevermined ID provides each agent with a unique wallet plus DID that maintains the same identity across environments without re-wiring. This enables agent discovery via protocols like A2A, direct linking to pricing plans, and tamper-evident event logs for audit trails.
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