Your agent can pay for
what it needs.

How an agent buys an API call.

L402 is a small convention built on three old, boring, reliable pieces: an HTTP status code from 1997, a payment network that settles in about a second, and a credential you can verify without a database lookup.

• 1 · Ask — and get a price, not a login wall. The agent calls a paid endpoint. Instead of 401 Unauthorized, the server answers HTTP 402 Payment Required with two things attached: a Lightning invoice (the price, often a single sat) and a macaroon — a scoped credential that isn't valid yet.
• 2 · Pay — about one second, about one sat. The agent pays the invoice over the Lightning Network from its own wallet. Settlement is final in roughly a second, and the wallet receives the preimage — a cryptographic receipt that only exists once the payment actually settled.
• 3 · Retry — payment becomes authorization. The agent repeats the identical request, now presenting macaroon + preimage together. The server checks that the receipt matches the credential and serves the response. No account was created, no card was stored, no human clicked a checkout.
• Why this fits agents. Card rails assume a human: identity, billing address, fraud history, a checkout flow. Agents have none of those. L402 needs only a wallet — which is exactly what the MCP server below provides. Budgets, payment history, and per-payment limits are built in, so your agent spends sats, not surprises.

Quickstart: give your agent a wallet.

The MCP server is free and open source (MIT), published on PyPI, NuGet, and Docker Hub — 24,000+ downloads and counting. Three steps from zero to a paid API call.

# 1 — Install (pick your runtime)
pip install lightning-enable-mcp        # Python
uvx lightning-enable-mcp                # Python, no install
dotnet tool install -g LightningEnable.Mcp   # .NET
docker pull refinedelement/lightning-enable-mcp:latest   # Docker

2 — Connect one L402-capable wallet. L402 needs a wallet that returns the payment preimage: Strike (easiest to start), NWC (CoinOS / CLINK / Alby Hub), or your own LND node. Add the MCP to your agent host — for Claude Desktop, that's one entry in claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lightning-enable": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["lightning-enable-mcp"],
      "env": { "STRIKE_API_KEY": "your-strike-api-key" }
    }
  }
}

3 — Prove the whole loop works. Ask your agent to run test_l402_payment. It pays a public 1-sat L402 endpoint end to end — wallet connected, preimage returned, response served. Total cost: about one satoshi. Then try the fun one: ask it to buy a t-shirt from the Lightning Enable Store.

What's free, what's paid.

Simple split: spending money is free, making money is the product.