pahz is a pay-as-it-goes rail for AI agents on Base. Open a tab, give your agent a budget, and let it pay per call — search, inference, data, tools — over x402. You watch the meter. Settlement is USDC on Base. Close the tap whenever you like.
An agent shouldn't need a credit card, an API key vault and a finance team to buy one search result. It should pay for the result, the moment it gets it, from a budget you set — and nothing else should be possible.
You fund a tab on Base with USDC and set a budget, a rate cap and an allowlist of services.
pahz.tab.open({budget: 5})The service answers 402 Payment Required with a price. Standard x402.
402 · 0.002 USDCIf the price, the rate and the service pass the tab's rules, pahz signs the micro-payment and retries the call.
pay(0.002) → 200 OKEvery payment appears on the meter with what it bought. You can watch live or read it later.
+0.002 · search · 41 msPayments batch into settlements on Base. One receipt per settlement, verifiable by anyone.
settled · 0x8a…f1A tab is a small on-chain account with rules. The agent never holds keys; it holds a tab. The tab decides what can be paid for, how fast, and until when.
A tab cannot spend more than it was funded with. Top-ups are your action, never the agent's.
A runaway loop hits the rate cap before it hits the budget. Calls above it are held, not paid.
Payments go only to endpoints you named. An agent that discovers a new API cannot pay it until you add it.
Per-service maximum price per call. A service that raises its price gets held, and you get a notification.
One click pauses all payments. The agent keeps running; it just stops being able to buy things.
Each payment records the service, the call, the price, the latency and the settlement it belongs to.
Give a research, coding or trading agent a tab instead of your card. See exactly what it spent on what.
One tab per agent, one budget per team. Roll up the meters into a single ledger on Base.
Add x402 to an endpoint and get paid per call in USDC, with no signups and no invoices. pahz tabs are already speaking your protocol.
Drop-in fetch wrapper. Your agents gain a wallet they cannot drain and a meter their owners can read.
x402 is the open standard where a server answers a request with 402 Payment Required and a price, and the client pays and retries. It turns any HTTP endpoint into something an agent can buy from. pahz does not replace it; pahz is the wallet on the client side that decides whether to pay.
Base is where x402 settles today, in USDC, for fractions of a cent per transaction. That is the only environment where paying 0.002 for one search result makes economic sense.
pahz adds what x402 leaves to the client: budgets, rate caps, allowlists, a meter, and a tap you can close.
An agent should pay for a result, not subscribe to a service.
The agent holds a tab, never a key.
Budgets are ceilings, not suggestions.
Every cent should be explainable in one line.
Closing the tap should never require stopping the agent.
Speed of payment should match speed of thought — and be capped.