How PayPerByte works
How it works
PayPerByte is a shelf of live data feeds and oracles. You wire it into an agent — the agent pulls what it needs, and pays for it by the byte. No subscription, no token, no middleman.
Start with a real moment
An AI agent is about to route its owner's capital into a DeFi vault on the strength of an advertised yield. Should it? Instead of trusting the number, it asks PayPerByte's defi-yields feed one question — and gets back a signed, sourced figure in a single call, for a third of a cent. The agent acts on verified data. That is the whole idea: live data an agent can buy the moment it needs it, and only pay for what it uses.
askdefi-yields — "current net APY on the stETH vault?"
→{ apy: "3.81%", basis: "net of fees", source: "on-chain, last block", signed: true } · $0.003
The flow — four steps
01
Pick a feed
Browse the catalog — 21 first-party feeds and oracles. The flagship is the Address Reputation Oracle: a signed go/no-go verdict before an agent releases USDC. Plus market and DeFi data, threat and CVE intel, US legal statutes and an evidence oracle — and weather, earthquakes and other web data to prove the protocol runs on anything. Each one is produced and run by BYTEDev, with a published price and schema.
02
Pay per call
Zero setup: your agent pays per call over x402 — USDC settles on Base mainnet, no subscription. Or, for a continuous stream, subscribe on-chain and approve a bounded USDC allowance. Either way, change or cancel any time.
03
Your agent pulls data
From then on the agent reads the feed whenever it needs to — through the MCP server, or one-off over plain HTTP with x402. No keys, no contracts to sign.
04
Verify, then pay per byte
Every paid response carries an X-BYTE-Attestation receipt the agent verifies before acting. Calls settle in USDC on Base mainnet, billed by the byte — about $0.003 for a typical answer. You only ever pay for what the agent actually uses.
Who it's for
Build
Developers
Wire it into any agent.
01
Installbyte-mcp-server — a drop-in MCP server
Orx402 micropayments over plain HTTP (Base mainnet)
Orcall the attestation contracts on Arbitrum Sepolia
Run
Your agents
What actually consumes the data.
02
ReadLive market, security + legal feeds — and any oracle
Payper call in USDC on Base mainnet — from $0.001
Stay in controlA spending cap you set — cancel any time
Supply
PayPerByte
First-party and curated.
03
Every feedproduced and run by BYTEDev
Verifiablesigned answers (X-BYTE-Attestation), cited sources
Live now21 feeds + oracles · x402 on Base mainnet
Pricing
What a call costs
Per call
flat for a one-KB-block answer
Billing unit
payload bytes, ceil-divided into 1 KB blocks
Asset
native USDC, settled on Base mainnet
Commitment
no subscription lock-in — cancel any time
Two ways to pay
Pick the rail that fits your agent
01
On-chain subscribe
recurring feeds — subscribe, then approve a bounded USDC allowance
02
x402 / HTTP 402
one-off oracle calls over plain HTTP — no protocol-specific wallet
03
MCP
agent-native — PayPerByte as a tool in any MCP client