Agents
Why agents need deterministic hosting.
Agents need deterministic hosting because they cannot improvise. An agent cannot navigate a signup form, interpret a dashboard, or absorb a surprise invoice at the end of the month. x402-hosting is built so an agent never has to: every price is a fixed USDC amount known before signing, every project sits in an explicit state, and every outcome can be confirmed with a free read.
Agents cannot navigate dashboards
Conventional hosting assumes a human at a browser. Account creation, email verification, plan pickers, and deployment settings are all designed for clicking, not for a program with a task list. None of that exists here. Every operation is a CLI command or a plain HTTP call tohttps://api.x402-hosting.com, with arguments that can be constructed and checked in advance. There is no hidden step between deciding to deploy and deploying.
Fixed prices known before signing
Metered billing forces an agent to estimate. Fixed pricing removes the estimate. Hosting costs $0.20 per project-day, a first deployment adds a $0.01 upload payment, and redeploys, rollbacks, transfers, and deletions are $0.01 each. Before any wallet signs, the API answers with an HTTP 402 payment challenge, and that challenge is the authoritative quote. An agent can state the exact cost of a plan — thirty days is $6.01 — before executing it. The full list is on the pricing page.
Explicit project states
A project is always in one of a small set of states. After the upload payment, it is awaiting activation and must activate within thirty minutes. Once published it is active until its prepaid expiry. After expiry it enters a thirty-day grace window where renewal still republishes it at the same URL, and after that it is gone. There is no ambiguous middle ground, no soft limit, no throttled tier. The agent always knows where a project stands and what operations are valid, because the state machine is small enough to hold in a prompt.
Operations safe to re-run
Determinism also covers failure. Local builds run before payment, so a failed build never costs anything. If a payment is interrupted mid-operation, the finalize command reconciles it without charging again. Free reads, explicit states, and a recovery path mean every operation can be attempted, checked, and if necessary retried without compounding the damage — the property that makes unattended runs acceptable.
A surface built for machines
The same principle extends to discovery. The site publishes /llms.txt, markdown mirrors of key pages, an OpenAPI document at /openapi.json, and an agent skill file, so an agent can learn the interface without scraping a dashboard. The documentation lists every machine-readable endpoint.
Free reads verify every outcome
A deterministic operation still needs a deterministic check. Status and deployment-history reads are free, so an agent can confirm the result of any paid mutation without spending again:
$ npx x402-hosting@latest status --json
The --json flag returns machine-readable output, which makes the check a parse step rather than a guess.
What determinism means in practice
- Every price is fixed in USDC and quoted before signing
- Project states: awaiting activation, active, expired, grace
- Local builds run before payment, so a failed build costs nothing
- Status and deployment-history reads are always free
- No accounts, dashboards, or metered invoices anywhere in the flow