Pay per call.
Skip the gas bill.
Agents hit APIs thousands of times a day at a fraction of a cent each. Traditional rails buckle at that price. Oris channels batch sub-cent payments into one on chain settlement. Agent pays per call. Provider gets paid per call. Gas stays tiny.
Gas eats half the API bill.
An AI research agent calls a market data feed 50,000 times a day at $0.002 a call. The on chain gas alone would cost more than the data. The math collapses.
Credit card processors do not support sub-cent transactions. Traditional invoicing creates reconciliation overhead. The agent needs a payment method that matches the granularity of its consumption.
The agent calls. The provider serves. The payment needs to settle in the same shape as the work.
Open a channel. Pay as you go.
Three primitives move the payment off the on chain critical path and onto a channel that settles in batches.
Open a channel
The developer configures a micropayment channel between the agent and the API provider. The channel allocates a budget from the agent's wallet. One on-chain transaction opens the channel.
Pay per call
Each API call triggers a micropayment through the channel. The payment updates the channel balance in memory. No on-chain transaction occurs per call. The agent pays. The provider tracks the balance.
Settle periodically
The channel settles periodically (hourly, daily, or when the budget is exhausted). A single on-chain transaction captures all accumulated micropayments. The API provider receives the total amount minus settlement gas costs.
Three pricing shapes. One channel.
Per call, tiered, or subscription. Three pricing shapes cover the full spread of API billing. Each one rides the same channel and the same low gas cost.
Pay-per-call
Fixed price per API call. The agent pays $0.003 per request. Oris tracks the running total and settles on schedule. The simplest model for predictable pricing. Example: 10,000 calls x $0.003 = $30.00 settled in one on-chain transaction.
Metered usage
Variable pricing based on response size, compute time, or data volume. The provider reports usage. Oris calculates the cost and deducts from the channel automatically. Example: $0.001 per KB of response size with variable cost per call.
Subscription with overage
Base monthly allocation with per-call pricing above the limit. Oris manages the allocation tracking and overage billing automatically. Example: $50 per month for 25K calls then $0.003 per call overage. No manual reconciliation required.
Open a channel. One call.
Every API call after that draws from the channel balance. Watch consumption live. Settle on the schedule you set.
Configure once, consume forever. The SDK handles signing, state updates, and settlement triggers. Channel state is queryable in real time so the agent can adapt its rate of consumption against its remaining budget.
# Configure API consumption for an agent channel = oris.micropayments.open( agent_id="agent_researcher", provider="0x7f3a...9c2d", # API provider wallet budget=100.00, # $100 daily budget settlement="hourly", chain="base", ) # Agent calls the API (payment happens automatically) response = agent.call_api( url="https://api.datavendor.com/market-data", payment_channel=channel.id, ) # Oris deducts $0.002 from the channel # Check consumption print(channel.spent) # $47.30 print(channel.remaining) # $52.70 print(channel.call_count) # 23,650
50,000 calls. One settlement.
50,000 calls a day at $0.002 each on Base. Settlements drop from 50,000 to 1. The daily total drops by a third.
Open your first channel today.
Set up a channel, connect your agent, and start paying per call at sub-cent rates. Settlement runs on your schedule.