Machine Customers

The HTTP 402 flow that lets autonomous machines and AI agents onboard and pay without a human.

Satelink is built so that a machine — an AI agent, a bot, a service — can become a paying customer without a human ever touching a dashboard. The mechanism is the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code, used the way it was always meant to be used.

The 402 flow

  1. A machine calls the gateway anonymously and eventually exhausts the free tier (500 calls/day per IP).
  2. The gateway answers 402 — and the response body is self-contained machine-readable onboarding:
    • the registration endpoint (POST /v1/machine/register),
    • the calldata endpoint for a USDT deposit (GET /credits/initiate),
    • the real minimum deposit (not a marketing number),
    • working example requests it can copy verbatim.
  3. The machine registers, receives an API key, and has its operator wallet send USDT to the RevenueVault on Polygon PoS.
  4. The deposit listener watches the chain; after ~25 confirmations the machine's balance is credited and its calls are metered at $0.00003 each.

No email. No credit card. No OAuth dance. The entire loop is HTTP + one on-chain transfer.

Try it

Exhaust the free tier (or just inspect a 402):

curl -i -X POST https://rpc.satelink.network/rpc \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_blockNumber","params":[],"id":1}'

Register a machine directly:

curl -X POST https://rpc.satelink.network/v1/machine/register \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"label":"my-agent"}'

Why this matters

Most infrastructure billing assumes a human with a browser and a credit card. Autonomous agents can't do that. Satelink's answer: make the error response itself the onboarding funnel, and make payment a plain ERC-20 transfer that any wallet-holding agent can execute. This is the foundation for the machine economy milestones on the Roadmap — the first fully autonomous machine-to-machine payment is an explicit target, honestly labeled as not yet achieved.