The internet is shifting from human users to autonomous AI agents as first-class economic participants. These agents browse the web, call APIs, rent compute, purchase data, and consume services — but today they have no native way to pay. Every transaction requires a human to pre-configure billing, manage API keys, or authorize charges.

Recur Protocol is the payment infrastructure layer built for this shift. It gives AI agents a unified, on-chain way to execute both one-time payments and recurring subscriptions — permissionlessly, transparently, and at Solana’s native speed and cost.

What Recur provides

For AI agent developers, Recur gives your agents the ability to pay for services autonomously, without human intervention or brittle workarounds. Agents can discover pricing from any Recur-compatible service, authorize a subscription on-chain, and have billing handled automatically from that point forward.

For service providers, Recur gives you a billing layer that works natively with agent traffic. Publish a pricing plan on-chain, add a middleware gate to your API, and start collecting — from both human and agent clients — without managing API keys or manual invoices.

Key capabilities

Capability	Description
One-time payments	x402-compatible per-request payment flow
Subscription plans	On-chain plan registry with automatic renewal
Allowances	Metered spend caps for usage-based billing
Payment sessions	High-frequency session tokens with batch settlement (coming in GA)
Webhooks	Structured lifecycle events for your infrastructure

How it works

Recur sits between agents and the services they pay for. Service providers publish pricing plans to the on-chain Recur Plan Registry. When an agent requests a paid resource, the service responds with a 402 Payment Required and the relevant plan terms. The agent (via the Recur SDK) reads those terms, authorizes the payment or subscription on-chain, and receives access.

The full architecture is documented in Architecture.

What Recur is not

Recur is not a wallet. It is not a stablecoin. It is not a layer-1 blockchain. It is billing infrastructure, designed to sit alongside existing wallets, tokens, and services — closer in spirit to Stripe than to any blockchain protocol.

Standards compatibility

Recur is a first-class implementation of x402, the HTTP-native payment protocol originated by Coinbase and now governed by a foundation including Google, Visa, Stripe, AWS, and others. Recur is also designed to be compatible with MPP (Machine Payments Protocol), the emerging IETF standard from Stripe and Tempo. Read more in x402 Compatibility and MPP Compatibility.

Get started

If you are building an AI agent and want it to pay for services:

1. Read the Quickstart
2. Install the Agent SDK
3. Review Plans and Subscriptions

If you are a service provider who wants to accept payments from agents:

1. Read the Quickstart
2. Install the Provider SDK
3. Create a plan and add the payment gate middleware

Beta scope

Recur is in public beta. The following are available now: one-time payments via the x402 flow, subscription plans, fixed allowances, the TypeScript SDK, the Recur Dashboard, and USDC on Solana mainnet.

Payment sessions, the Python SDK, the decentralized facilitator network, USDT support, and cross-chain are all on the roadmap for general availability and beyond.