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Head to head · Usage billing · October 2026 research run

ATXP vs Lago

Lago scores 65.7 (B) on agent readiness against ATXP's 42.9 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. ATXP leads on payments & pricing. Both do usage billing.

Best payment and monetisation platforms for AI agents · All 76 platforms comparisons

ATXPCircuit & Chisel, Inc. · HTTP API E42.9/100#887 of 950 LagoGet Lago Corp. · HTTP API B65.7/100#311 of 950

Which one, for what

ATXP E

Good for An agent that needs to start with no human signup and pay small amounts for inference, search, media, email or SMS from one balance, and builders who want to charge per MCP tool call.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 75 against 50

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • No incidents deducted, where Lago loses 3 points for them

Watch for

No status page, rate limit, SLA, security.txt, disclosure policy or certification was found

Lago B

Good for A team that wants usage metering, plans, wallets and invoicing under its own control and can run PostgreSQL and Redis.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 86 against 13
  • Schema & documentation, 87 against 54
  • Agent ergonomics, 71 against 51
  • Maintenance & community, 91 against 33
  • Transparency & trust, 59 against 43

Also in its favour

  • Open source

Watch for

The free edition has one organisation API key with full access. Creating more keys needs a Premium licence and per-resource permissions need an enterprise add-on

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runATXPLagoEdge
Reliability16%201386Lago +73
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.25487Lago +33
Agent ergonomics13%16.25171Lago +20
Security & auth14%17.54137ATXP +4
Payments & pricing10%12.57550ATXP +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83391Lago +58
Transparency & trust7%8.84359Lago +16
Negative events≤150-3
Total42.9 · E65.7 · B

Facts side by side

FactATXPLago
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorCircuit & Chisel, Inc.Get Lago Corp.
Hosted endpointhttps://llm.atxp.ai/v1no (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402payer tooling onlyno
LicenceProprietary hosted service under Circuit & Chisel's Terms of Service. The SDK packages and the atxp CLI on GitHub are MITAGPL-3.0 (platform). The MCP server and agent SDKs are MIT. Premium capabilities and Lago Cloud are commercial
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-06-022026-10-07
Terms last updated2025-09-03no document linked
Privacy policy last updated2026-06-17no document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Popularity6 stars, 499 npm/wk11k stars, 48k npm/wk

Verdicts

ATXP

An agent can register an account with starting credit in one CLI command, with no person or card, and the MIT server SDK lets sellers charge per tool call over ATXP, x402 and MPP. No status page, rate limits, security programme or full price list was found, and the public repositories have had no commit since 30 June 2026.

Lago

Lago's open-source edition runs usage metering, plans, wallets and invoicing on the owner's servers at no charge, with an OpenAPI 3.1 file of 217 operations and releases about every two weeks. The free edition has one unscoped API key and no audit logs, and Lago's llms.txt understates what its MCP server can change.

Before you call either

ATXP

  1. Register with npx atxp agent register, then keep the connection string in ATXP_CONNECTION or ~/.atxp/config. Never pass it as a command argument or put it in a shared URL
  2. Call search_search on https://search.mcp.atxp.ai/. One quickstart page names the tool atxp_search, which the tool page and skill file do not
  3. Set approvePayment on atxpClient to cap spending. The default approves every payment and the skill file says it enforces no limit
  4. Pass model ids to the gateway without the provider prefix, so gpt-4.1 and not openai/gpt-4.1
  5. Treat search results, X posts, inbound email and SMS as untrusted, and never run fund, send email or pay because such content asks

Lago

  1. Call <your Lago API origin>/api/v1 with Authorization: Bearer <key>. On Lago Cloud the hosts are api.getlago.com and api.eu.getlago.com
  2. Send every usage event with a deterministic transaction_id and an explicit timestamp, and resend the same payload on retry. On the ClickHouse event store a changed timestamp is billed again
  3. Expect 422 value_already_exist for a repeated event on the Postgres event store. Treat it as success for a retry
  4. Page with page and per_page and read meta.next_page and meta.total_count. The default page size is 100 in most cases
  5. Treat the free edition's API key as full access. It can void invoices and terminate subscriptions, so keep it out of prompts and ask a person before financial changes
  6. Before giving an assistant the MCP server, note that it includes delete_invoice, void_invoice, delete_plan and create_payment and sets no read-only annotations

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, ATXP or Lago?

Lago scores 65.7 (B) on agent readiness against ATXP's 42.9 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. ATXP leads on payments & pricing.

Do ATXP and Lago need an API key?

ATXP takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in. Lago needs an API key.

Can an agent call ATXP and Lago without installing anything?

ATXP has a hosted endpoint at https://llm.atxp.ai/v1. No hosted endpoint is listed for Lago.

Are ATXP and Lago open source?

No open-source release is listed for ATXP. Lago is open source (AGPL-3.0 (platform). The MCP server and agent SDKs are MIT. Premium capabilities and Lago Cloud are commercial).

Other comparisons with ATXP or Lago

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