charge for your tools
Point bolthub at an endpoint you already run, or wrap an MCP tool with bolthub Pay, set a per-call price, and you have a paid tool. Agents pay per call over Lightning and you settle straight to your wallet; bolthub runs the metering and never touches the money.
No Lightning wallet yet? Deploy your own non-custodial node in minutes, from ~$3.50/month, and you keep the keys.
your-api · settlement
SETTLED⚡ straight to your wallet
A REST call or an MCP tool invocation is worth a fraction of a cent. Card networks won’t process anything under roughly fifty cents, and the fees would dwarf the charge anyway, so most APIs fall back to monthly subscriptions, prepaid credits, and the busywork of issuing and revoking API keys.
bolthub closes that gap. Using the open HTTP 402 standard (L402 over Lightning), you can charge per request with true micropayment granularity, and the buyer can be a human, a script, or an autonomous AI agent.
Match the meter to how your API delivers value: fixed, by size, by bucket, by time, or by balance. Pricing a tool with the SDK instead? You set a flat per-call amount in code.
A fixed price for every call.
Price scales with response size.
Sell a batch of requests upfront.
Unlimited access for a window.
Prepaid balance, deducted per use.
Your wallet issues the invoices and your wallet receives the sats. bolthub is never in the funds path, there is no balance to withdraw and nothing for us to freeze. See the security model.
Your tools expose an OpenAPI + MCP definition, so any paying agent can discover them and settle per call — no signups or API keys to hand out.
To get paid you need a wallet that can receive sats. If you don’t run one, the Node Launcher spins up your own non-custodial Lightning node on a VPS you control, from ~$3.50/month. You hold the keys, and bolthub can never touch the funds.
What you get
Deploy to Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway, or LunaNode, or bring your own VPS.
Self-host bolthub Pay and it’s free — you keep 100% of what you charge. Prefer bolthub to host the paywall, metering, and gateway? That’s a 5,000 sats/month base fee plus usage. Either way your customers’ per-call payments never pass through us — see pricing.
start selling
Self-host the SDK free, or start on the hosted platform: 1-month free trial, usage-based billing after that.