You.com has added machine payments to its Web Search and Finance Research APIs, allowing an autonomous agent with a funded wallet to buy a result without first creating an account, obtaining an API key or maintaining a prepaid credit balance.
The change applies to GET /v1/search and POST /v1/finance_research. An unpaid request receives payment terms, and the agent can settle the amount in the same HTTP exchange used to request the data.
Two payment protocols sit alongside the existing API model
Both endpoints advertise support for x402 and the Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP. You.com accepts USDC for x402 transactions on Base or Solana. MPP payments use USDC on Tempo and settle through Stripe.
The approach changes how a software agent can obtain live web or financial information. Conventional API access assumes a person or organisation has already completed signup, stored a credential and established billing. A machine-payment request can negotiate and pay at run time, which is more suitable for agents that discover a service while completing a task.
This is an additional access path rather than a replacement for account-based API keys. Teams with predictable usage, central billing and organisation-level controls may still prefer conventional credentials. Keyless access is aimed at cases where per-request purchasing and programmatic settlement are more valuable than a standing commercial relationship.
Prices are explicit, with one protocol difference
Web Search costs US$0.005 per call through x402 and US$0.01 through MPP. You.com says the MPP price is rounded to one cent because Stripe cannot charge half a cent. Adding live crawl increases the quoted Web Search price by US$0.001 for each result under either protocol.
Deep Finance Research costs US$0.11 per request, while the exhaustive mode costs US$0.50. Those prices are the same for x402 and MPP and match You.com’s standard credit pricing.
Developers need to use the documented HTTP verb. You.com advertises payment terms for Web Search on GET and Finance Research on POST; using the other verb returns a 401 response. That detail is easy to miss when an agent constructs requests dynamically.
Keyless access also changes the governance boundary
You.com states that its Zero Data Retention setting does not apply to these keyless requests. The setting is enforced against an organisation’s API keys, and a wallet-paid request does not carry one. That is an important limitation for applications handling confidential prompts, proprietary research questions or regulated data.
A funded wallet also creates its own operational questions. Developers need spending limits, transaction records and controls over which agent can approve a payment. A compromised or poorly constrained agent could otherwise make repeated purchases even when each individual request is inexpensive.
Responses should also be logged with enough information to reconcile the data request and the associated on-chain or payment-processor transaction. That will matter for debugging, accounting and disputes, particularly when an agent can choose between protocols or vary the number of live-crawl results.
The release is a concrete step towards agents that procure capabilities as they work. It removes the account setup that normally stands between discovering an API and calling it, but it does not remove trust, privacy or budget considerations. For production use, the wallet and its policy layer become as important as the API integration itself.