Point bolthub at an endpoint you already run, set a per-call price — down to a single sat — and you have a paid API. Your customers’ payments settle straight to your Lightning wallet. bolthub runs the metering and the paywall; it never touches the money.
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 L402 / HTTP 402 standard over the Lightning Network, 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.
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.
Every listing is published to the API Hub with an OpenAPI + MCP definition, so agents and developers can find your endpoints and start paying per call.
A 4,000 sats/month platform fee covers the gateway, hub listing, and infrastructure. Your customers’ per-call payments never pass through us — the two paths never cross.
14-day free trial. Usage-based billing after that, paid monthly via Lightning.
market-intel.gw.bolthub.ai
weather-api.gw.bolthub.ai
Browse the API Hub and try a paid request with your Lightning wallet. No signup needed to explore.