How are people handling paid external APIs for autonomous agents?

[ArielB1980]

I’m curious how others are handling this in practice.

When agents can:

• call tools autonomously
• retry on failures
• run without supervision
  traditional approaches (API keys, subscriptions, per-user billing) start to break down.

I’ve been experimenting with a small prototype that treats payment as an authorization primitive:

• humans pre-fund budgets
• agents get capped, retry-safe access
• agents never hold wallets or keys

Not trying to promote anything — genuinely interested in how people here are solving this today, and whether this abstraction makes sense or misses something obvious.

Would appreciate any thoughts or pointers.

[greysonlalonde]

ap2 / variations of it. I have an extension branch for a2a running somewhere, I'll put it up eventually.

[ArielB1980]

Interesting — thanks for sharing. Curious whether you’ve found this approach reusable across different providers / agents, or if it stays pretty framework-specific?

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On 26 Jan 2026 at 09:37 +0100, Greyson LaLonde ***@***.***>, wrote: ap2 / variations of it. I have an extension branch for a2a running somewhere, I'll put it up eventually. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[greysonlalonde]

very easy to use across any surface area, really

[ArielB1980]

That makes sense. Curious where you’ve found policy / limits / revocation logic tends to live with that approach — does it stay embedded in app code, or do you centralize it somewhere?

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On 26 Jan 2026 at 09:48 +0100, Greyson LaLonde ***@***.***>, wrote: very easy to use across any surface area, really — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>