machine payment

The category is named for the step it removes. Stripe's documentation for the pattern states that monetizing an API or service typically requires account creation, subscription selection and payment entry. Those flows require human input, which blocks agents from completing tasks autonomously. Machine payments, in the same document's words, let agents pay for APIs and services programmatically: the server returns a payment challenge, the agent presents a valid payment credential, and the payment settles.

The boundary against agentic commerce is drawn in that same documentation's own integration table, and it is drawn by capability rather than by opinion. Sharing a product catalogue with agents belongs to selling through them, and is listed as unsupported for machine payments. The protocols each side is pointed at differ accordingly: MPP and x402 for accepting machine payments, the commerce protocols for selling through agents.

For anything reading endpoints from outside, the consequence is that the terms are on the wire. A machine payment starts with a response a client can read without a person. What an endpoint charges, on which network and to which address, is stated in that answer rather than inside an account somebody opened earlier. That is also the whole of what a single reading shows: the terms offered, at the moment they were asked for.