Typical fit
- Recurring paid requests with clear merchant boundaries.
- Agent hosts that need approvals or budget controls before spend.
- Operators who need receipts and audit context after execution.
Use cases
Built for teams that want payment access and governance together.
402flow is strongest when a team wants to keep paid API adoption easy for developers and keep spend, policy, and receipts visible for operators.
Where it fits
Phase-one use cases for 402flow.
These are the workflows where the control-plane story becomes concrete quickly instead of feeling like infrastructure theory.
Agents buying research or data APIs
Put policy and receipts around recurring information purchases instead of embedding payment and approval logic into every research workflow.
Internal tool hosts with cost controls
Keep the request surface simple while the control plane enforces posture, merchant fit, and spend bounds for internal agent workloads.
Operators managing merchant scope
Centralize which merchants are allowed, which ones require review, and how denials should surface before a paid call executes.
Teams that need durable receipt evidence
Treat receipt persistence and audit context as product features, not as whatever happened to be logged by the runtime that paid the merchant.
Two audiences
Two audiences, one shared control model.
The developer and operator stories are different, but they should still lead back to the same governed request lifecycle.
For developers
- One SDK surface instead of protocol branching in application code.
- Hosted proof routes for quick end-to-end integration checks.
- A path from fast fetch to prepare-and-execute when the host needs more control.
For operators
- Per-agent and per-merchant rules before execution is allowed.
- Approval routing when a request falls outside policy.
- Receipts and audit context stored centrally after the request completes.
Next step
Pick one real workflow and prove it end to end.
The fastest way to evaluate fit is to map one paid agent workflow onto the SDK and the hosted merchant surface, then inspect how policy and receipts change the operating model.