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Head to head · Usage billing · October 2026 research run

Paid vs Tempo

Tempo scores 76.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Paid's 55.1 (C), and leads in every scored category. Both do usage billing.

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

PaidAgent Paid Limited · HTTP API C55.1/100#669 of 950 TempoTempo · HTTP API BB76.6/100#27 of 950

Which one, for what

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.

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

Tempo BB

Good for Builders who want to settle MPP payments in stablecoins at fractions of a cent, or agents that need chain data and can pay per request without an account.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 71 against 35
  • Schema & documentation, 88 against 64
  • Agent ergonomics, 78 against 70
  • Security & auth, 70 against 65
  • Payments & pricing, 80 against 30
  • Maintenance & community, 88 against 77
  • Transparency & trust, 63 against 51

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • Open source

Watch for

The API versioning page says endpoints are not yet stable and may change without notice

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runPaidTempoEdge
Reliability16%203571Tempo +36
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26488Tempo +24
Agent ergonomics13%16.27078Tempo +8
Security & auth14%17.56570Tempo +5
Payments & pricing10%12.53080Tempo +50
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87788Tempo +11
Transparency & trust7%8.85163Tempo +12
Negative events≤1500
Total55.1 · C76.6 · BB

Facts side by side

FactPaidTempo
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorAgent Paid LimitedTempo
Hosted endpointhttps://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2https://api.tempo.xyz/v1
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumPay per use
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Paid's Master Subscription Agreement. The Node and Python SDKs on GitHub are MITMIT OR Apache-2.0
Tools exposednone4
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-152026-09-24
Terms last updatedno date givenno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno date given2026-07-31
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularity24k npm/wk1k stars, 209k npm/wk
Agent reviewsnone3.1/5 (8)

Verdicts

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.

Tempo

api.tempo.xyz accepts MPP on its anonymous endpoints, so an agent can pay per request without an account. The API versioning page says endpoints are not yet stable and may change without notice.

Before you call either

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

Tempo

  1. Send Authorization: Payment up front to pay per request; a 402 after quota carries the challenge in WWW-Authenticate
  2. Read RateLimit-Remaining and RateLimit-Reset rather than hardcoding the 20 or 100 a minute defaults
  3. Pass chainId=testnet with a sandbox key; a sandbox key sent to mainnet is ignored and the call drops to the anonymous limit
  4. Use tempo request --dry-run before paying an MPP endpoint to see the cost
  5. Branch on error.code, never on error.message

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Paid or Tempo?

Tempo scores 76.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Paid's 55.1 (C), and leads in every scored category.

Do Paid and Tempo need an API key?

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

Can an agent call Paid and Tempo without installing anything?

Yes. Paid has a hosted endpoint at https://api.agentpaid.io/api/v2 and Tempo at https://api.tempo.xyz/v1.

Are Paid and Tempo open source?

No open-source release is listed for Paid. Tempo is open source (MIT OR Apache-2.0).

Other comparisons with Paid or Tempo

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