Per request
The default. One x402 micropayment per fetch, settled as it happens.
- No account, no key
- Residential exit included
- Failed requests refunded
- Budget ceilings enforced
06 · AGENTSAgent Access — live for developersYour agent pays
Your agent pays
its own way.
The first residential proxy and VPN an AI agent can use on its own. No account to create, no key to leak — one x402 micropayment per request, settled on-chain in fractions of a cent.
x402 HANDSHAKENO ACCOUNT · NO KEY
- GET /v1/fetchAn agent asks for a page. No account, no API key.
- 402 Payment RequiredThe gateway quotes 0.0004 USDC for this request.
- PAY · x402The agent signs and pays from its own wallet.
- 200 OKServed through a residential exit in 240 ms.
SPENT THIS SESSION0.0128 USDC · 32 req
$0.0004PER REQUEST
240 msMEDIAN RESPONSE
200,014,382RESIDENTIAL EXITS
0CREDENTIALS TO LEAK
[ WHY AGENTS GET STUCK ]
Every layer of the internet assumes a human is holding the account
An agent can't sign up for a VPN — signup needs an email, a card and a checkbox. It can't safely hold your API key, because a key in a context window is a key one prompt injection away from leaving. And the moment it runs from a datacenter, it gets captcha-walled by everything worth reading.
NO IDENTITY
Signup flows want an email, a card and a human clicking accept.
KEY EXPOSURE
Long-lived credentials in a context window are a breach waiting to happen.
DATACENTER IP
Cloud ranges are blocked or captcha-walled by almost everything.
NO BUDGET CONTROL
Flat plans give you no way to cap what one runaway loop can spend.
AGENT TRIES TO FETCH A PAGEFOUR ROUTES
THE WAY IT WORKS TODAY
- Sign up for a VPNNEEDS A HUMAN
- Use the operator's API keyLEAKS ON INJECTION
- Fetch from the datacenterCAPTCHA WALL
WITH ION AGENTS
- Pay 0.0004 USDC, fetch the page200 OK · 240 ms
The paymentisthe authentication. There is nothing else to hold, rotate or leak.
[ HOW x402 WORKS ]
HTTP already had a status code for this
402 Payment Required has been in the spec since 1997, unused. x402 finally gives it a settlement layer — and it turns out to be exactly the primitive software needs to buy things for itself.
01 · REQUESTThe agent just asks
A plain HTTP request to the gateway. No Authorization header, because there is no account for one to point at.
02 · QUOTEThe gateway prices it
A 402 response carries the amount, the asset and the address — machine-readable, so no human has to read a pricing page.
03 · SETTLEThe agent signs
A signed payment from the agent's own wallet, within the budget its operator set. Settlement takes milliseconds and costs a fraction of a cent.
04 · DELIVERA home carries it
The request exits through a consenting residential connection in the geography that was asked for. No captcha, because nothing looks automated.
[ QUICKSTART ]
Four lines, no signup step
There is no console to log into and no key to provision, so the getting-started guide is the code. Fund a wallet, set a budget, point the client at the gateway.
TypeScript & Python SDKs — or raw HTTP if you'd rather not add a dependency
MCP server — drop it into Claude Code or any MCP-capable agent runtime
Budget ceilings — a hard cap per session, per day and per agent
import { IonAgent } from "@ice/agent";
const agent = new IonAgent({
wallet: process.env.ION_WALLET,
budget: "2.00 USDC", // hard ceiling
geo: "US/tx/austin"
});
const page = await agent.fetch(url);
// paid 0.0004 · exit 24.28.119.60 · 240 ms
console.log(agent.spent()); // "0.0128 USDC"
# 1 — ask. no auth header at all.
curl https://p.ice.io/v1/fetch \
-d '{"url":"https://example.com"}'
402 Payment Required
x-402-amount: 0.0004
x-402-asset: USDC
x-402-address: 0x9f2c…44e1
# 2 — pay and repeat, one header.
curl https://p.ice.io/v1/fetch \
-H "x-402-payment: $SIGNED" \
-H "x-ion-geo: DE/berlin/telekom" \
-d '{"url":"https://example.com"}'
200 OK
{
"mcpServers": {
"ion": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@ice/mcp-proxy"],
"env": {
"ION_WALLET": "0x…",
"ION_BUDGET": "2.00 USDC",
"ION_GEO": "US/tx/austin"
}
}
}
}
// exposes: ion_fetch, ion_browse, ion_geo
{
"status": 200,
"exit": {
"type": "residential",
"isp": "Spectrum",
"cc": "US"
},
"timing": { "connect": 21, "total": 240 },
"payment": {
"rail": "x402",
"amount": "0.0004 USDC",
"settled": true
},
"captcha": false,
"logs_retained": 0
}
[ WHAT YOU GET ]
Designed for software that has to spend money carefully
NO ACCOUNT, NO KEYThe payment is the auth
Nothing to provision, nothing to rotate, nothing that survives a prompt injection. An agent that gets compromised can spend the budget in its wallet and not one cent more.
PER-REQUEST SETTLEMENTSub-cent, on-chain
$0.0004 a request, settled the moment it happens. No plan to size in advance, no unused commitment at the end of the month, no invoice reconciliation.
RESIDENTIAL BY DEFAULTAgents stop getting walled
Every request exits through a real household on a real consumer ISP, in the geography you asked for. The captcha rate drops to what a person at home sees.
BUDGET CEILINGSA runaway loop is capped
Hard limits per session, per day and per agent, enforced at the wallet. The worst case for a broken loop is a small number, not a support ticket.
FLEET ACCOUNTINGPer-agent cost, exactly
Each agent spends from its own wallet, so attribution is arithmetic rather than guesswork. Usage streams to a webhook in real time.
ZERO LOGSNothing to subpoena
Billing runs on the payment rail, not on request records, so what your agents fetch is never written down on our side at all.
BUDGET ENFORCEMENT
The blast radius of a bad loop is the wallet balance
Set a ceiling when you construct the agent. The client refuses to sign past it, the gateway refuses to serve past it, and both are enforced before anything is spent rather than reported after. There is no overage bill, because there is no mechanism to produce one.
agent-04 · SESSION BUDGET● WITHIN LIMIT
SPENT0.4128 / 2.00 USDC
Requests1,032
Avg cost$0.0004
Captchas hit0
Failed & refunded3
[ PRICING ]
Pay per request, or per gigabyte. Never per month.
There is no plan to choose and no seat to buy. Fund a wallet and spend what you actually use.
Per gigabyte
For fleets moving serious traffic — same network, billed on bytes instead of calls.
- Unlimited concurrency
- Country → state → city → ISP targeting
- Volume rates from 5 TB
- Usage webhook & per-agent attribution
- No minimum, no contract
Bundled
Building on ION for yourself as well? The consumer stack includes agent credit.
- 5 GB of agent traffic monthly
- VPN, Mail, Browser, Vault
- Overflow at $1.20/GB
- Founding price locked 12 months
Settled in USDC on the ION chain · First gigabyte free · No card, no invoice, no sales call
[ COMPARE ]
What an agent can actually do on its own
| Feature comparison | Consumer VPN | Proxy API with keys | ION Agents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signup needed | Human, card, email | Human, then a key | None |
| Credential to leak | Account password | Long-lived API key | None |
| Blast radius if compromised | The whole account | Whole plan balance | Wallet budget only |
| Billing granularity | Monthly | Prepaid blocks | Per request |
| Per-agent attribution | No | Key per agent, manual | Wallet per agent |
| Exit type | Datacenter | Mixed | Residential |
| Captcha rate | High | Medium | Household baseline |
[ USE CASES ]
What people build on it
RESEARCH AGENTSRead the whole web
A research agent that hits a captcha is a research agent that stops. Residential exits keep long autonomous runs going without a human unblocking them.
SHOPPING & BOOKINGLocal prices, real availability
Fares and prices are geo-personalised. An agent that exits inside the market sees what its user would see, not the datacenter version.
MONITORINGWatch from everywhere
Check availability, pricing and content from dozens of countries on a schedule, paying only for the checks that actually run.
AGENT MARKETPLACESSell bandwidth downstream
Because settlement is per request, a platform can pass exact cost through to its own users with no plan sizing in between.
EVALUATION HARNESSESReproducible web access
Pin an exit geography so a benchmark sees the same internet on every run, and attribute cost to the run that spent it.
SANDBOXED TOOLSUntrusted code, capped spend
Hand a sandboxed tool a wallet with two dollars in it. That is the entire security review for its network budget.
[ FAQ ]
Questions people actually ask
You fund a wallet once and the SDK handles everything after that — signing, settlement, retries, refunds on failure. If you'd rather not touch it at all, the same network is available through ION Proxies with ordinary card billing. x402 exists here because it's the only way an agent can pay without a human, not because payments needed to be more interesting.
The wallet holds only what you put in it, and budgets are enforced in two places — the client refuses to sign past the ceiling and the gateway refuses to serve past it. Set a session budget of two dollars and two dollars is the entire worst case, including for an agent that has been prompt-injected.
Settlement adds a few milliseconds and is pipelined against the fetch, so median end-to-end response is 240 ms including the exit hop. Payments also batch on the rail behind the scenes — the per-request accounting is exact without a per-request chain write.
It's retried on a fresh exit inside the gateway. If it still fails, the payment is refunded automatically — you only pay for responses you actually got. The refund count is in every usage report.
Same network, same exits, same targeting. The difference is the front door: ION Proxies expects a human to hold an account and a key, ION Agents expects nobody to. If your agents run under your own supervision with your key, the proxy API is simpler. If they run autonomously, or you're handing network access to code you don't fully trust, this is the one you want.
Yes — allowlists and blocklists per wallet, plus the network-wide category blocks that apply to everyone. Node operators can also refuse categories on their own connection, so restrictions exist on both ends.
The gateway and the agent API are live for early partners today, ahead of the consumer apps. Keys and trial credit are issued in join order.
[ 06 · AGENTS ]
Give your agent a wallet and a way out
API access, a free trial gigabyte, and founding rates for teams that build before launch.
Keys issued in join order · no sales call required