Where 402flow fits.
402flow is for teams whose agents pay for APIs, or soon will, and who need a say in how that money is spent. Here are the workflows it’s built for, and the controls you’d use for each.
Research and data agents
An agent buys briefs, search results, or datasets from a few paid APIs, many times a day. Each call is cheap, and the total adds up quickly.
Give each agent a daily budget and each vendor a per-request ceiling. Reports show spend by agent and vendor, so you can see which sources earn their cost.
Example policy Each research agent 25 USDC per day Each data vendor 1 USDC per request Internal tools and copilots
Your own tools call paid services on behalf of employees. When one loops or misfires, nobody notices until the bill arrives.
Each tool gets its own credential, so every payment is attributed to it. An organization cap stops a runaway loop before it becomes a surprise.
Example policy The organization 100 USDC per month Each internal tool 5 USDC per day Agents that find merchants on their own
Agents discover paid endpoints at runtime, from catalogs and directories, so you can’t list every merchant in advance.
Start with allow and monitor. New merchants show up in Reports as observed, and you approve the ones you trust and give them limits. Or run deny by default and approve each new merchant from the review queue.
Example setup Posture Allow and monitor New merchants Observed until you approve them Approved merchants The limits you set Teams that reconcile agent spend
Finance or operations has to match what agents paid with what they actually received.
Every payment gets a receipt confirmed onchain and a delivery result recorded separately. When the two disagree, an exception opens with the evidence attached.
What each request records Receipt Confirmed onchain Delivery Recorded separately Paid, not delivered Exception open for triage
A good fit looks like this.
- Your agents make paid requests regularly, not just once.
- You want limits in place before an agent spends, not a report afterward.
- Someone has to answer for agent spend and match it to what was delivered.
Bring one of these workflows to a pilot.
A pilot runs for up to 60 days on one agent workflow, in a test or controlled payment environment, with no software fee.