HTTP 402 Was Reserved in 1997. AI Agents Finally Make It Useful.

Last month, one of my AI agents tried to call another agent's skin analysis API. It had the credentials. It had the data. But there was no way to pay $0.002 for that single inference call without routing through Stripe, waiting for webhook confirmation, and eating a $0.30 minimum fee. The transaction cost was 150x the actual service price. I killed the integration. That failure made me realize: we have AI agents that can negotiate, reason, and execute — but they still can't pay each other. — The $8.4 Billion Gap Nobody's Building For Here's the uncomfortable math. The AI agent market is projected to hit $28 billion by 2027. Conservative estimates say 20-30% of agent interactions will require some form of micropayment — one agent buying data from another, paying for compute, licensing a model's output. That's a $5.6 to $8.4 billion payment layer that doesn't exist yet. Right now, if your agent needs to pay for something, your options are: Stripe/PayPal — Minimum fees make anything under