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Head to head · Usage billing · October 2026 research run

ATXP vs Paid

Paid scores 55.1 (C) on agent readiness against ATXP's 42.9 (E), and leads in 6 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 PaidAgent Paid Limited · HTTP API C55.1/100#669 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 30

Watch for

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

Paid C

Good for A team selling an AI agent that needs usage metering, credit balances, cost and margin tracking and invoicing in one service, with Stripe as the payment rail.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 35 against 13
  • Schema & documentation, 64 against 54
  • Agent ergonomics, 70 against 51
  • Security & auth, 65 against 41
  • Maintenance & community, 77 against 33
  • Transparency & trust, 51 against 43

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The docs index advertises an OpenAPI 3.1 file at two addresses, and both returned 404 on 9 October 2026

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runATXPPaidEdge
Reliability16%201335Paid +22
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.25464Paid +10
Agent ergonomics13%16.25170Paid +19
Security & auth14%17.54165Paid +24
Payments & pricing10%12.57530ATXP +45
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83377Paid +44
Transparency & trust7%8.84351Paid +8
Negative events≤1500
Total42.9 · E55.1 · C

Facts side by side

FactATXPPaid
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorCircuit & Chisel, Inc.Agent Paid Limited
Hosted endpointhttps://llm.atxp.ai/v1https://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or 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 MITProprietary service under Paid's Master Subscription Agreement. The Node and Python SDKs on GitHub are MIT
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-06-022026-09-15
Terms last updated2025-09-03no date given
Privacy policy last updated2026-06-17no date given
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesnot found in the text
Popularity6 stars, 499 npm/wk24k 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.

Paid

Paid suits a builder who wants usage metering, credits and invoicing behind one API, with restricted and customer-bound keys, OAuth on the MCP server and a free plan that needs no card. No status page, SLA figure, API changelog or rate-limit numbers were found, both advertised OpenAPI links returned 404, and card payments need the builder's own Stripe account.

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

Paid

  1. Call https://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2 with Authorization: Bearer <key>. A person creates the first key at app.paid.ai. No programmatic signup was found
  2. Give every signal a stable idempotencyKey and resend the same key on retry. Signals without one are not deduplicated
  3. Send at most 500 signals a request. A 429 rejects the whole batch, so wait for Retry-After and resend it all
  4. Read the code field on a 429. CONCURRENCY_LIMIT_EXCEEDED carries no Retry-After and clears when an analytics query finishes
  5. Install the Python SDK as paid-python, the name in its README and pyproject.toml. The quickstart's pip install paid names a package we could not check

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, ATXP or Paid?

Paid scores 55.1 (C) on agent readiness against ATXP's 42.9 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. ATXP leads on payments & pricing.

Do ATXP and Paid need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call ATXP and Paid without installing anything?

Yes. ATXP has a hosted endpoint at https://llm.atxp.ai/v1 and Paid at https://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2.

Other comparisons with ATXP or Paid

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