The Pay-Per-Use Agent Economy Opportunity: A 4-Step SMB Playbook for x402 and AI Agent Payments

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments is now generally available (built with Coinbase and Stripe): AI agents pay for APIs, data, and model inference one request at a time over the open x402 standard, with spending limits enforced at the infrastructure layer. x402 moved 75M payments worth $24M in the last 30 days across 94K buyers and 22K sellers (~32 cents each). A 4-step, zero-enterprise-contract SMB playbook makes your business reachable, priceable, and payable by an agent: (1) pick your side of the 32-cent rail, (2) make your best output agent-payable, (3) hard spending cap via AgentCore + Coinbase, (4) measure the agent channel.