Tollbooth for Agencies

Tollbooth for SEO agencies

A playbook for agencies (boutique → mid-market) that want to add "we'll help you opt out of AI training, and you're already set up to monetize the moment buyer-side x402 lands at OpenAI / Anthropic / Perplexity" to their service menu — without locking clients into a single CDN.

If you're a publisher with one or two sites, the install page at agent402.tools/tollbooth is enough. This page is for someone deploying across 10-100 client properties.

The pitch (to your client)

In 2024-2025 every major news publisher, SaaS, e-commerce, and DTC brand quietly discovered that AI training crawlers had been eating their content for years. The Cloudflare AI Crawl Toll is the loudest answer; it's also a single-vendor lock-in priced as a CDN add-on. Tollbooth is the open, portable alternative:

• Block AI training scrapers today (no AI vendor cooperation required — PoW is a free deterrent).
• Be ready to monetize the instant OpenAI / Anthropic / Perplexity ship buyer-side x402 (USDC settles direct to the publisher's wallet — no Stripe, no merchant of record, no agency in the middle of the money).
• Portable across hosts: Express, Next.js middleware, a reverse proxy, a Cloudflare Worker, Deno or Bun. WordPress plugin in beta. Move a client off Cloudflare, the gate moves with them.

Pricing & partner economics

	Solo	Team	Agency	Enterprise
Price	$19/mo	$99/mo	$299/mo	Contact
Sites	1	25	100	Unlimited
Retention	30d	90d	1y	Custom

Annual prepay = 16% off (2 months free). Full pricing and waitlist at agent402.tools/tollbooth/cloud.

Partner program: 20% lifetime recurring on every Team or Agency plan you refer. Paid via Stripe — not USDC — so the protocol's non-custodial promise stays clean (we never touch the publisher's settled funds, and neither does your kickback). Apply via the partner-program link on the Cloud page.

Two-sided kicker: any wallet running a verified Tollbooth install earns 1.5× bonus Agent402.tools credit per dollar of settled USDC. Your clients can spend it on the ~1,100 paid tools they'd otherwise be paying API vendors for — useful for client deliverables (content extraction, SERP scraping, geocoding, OCR, PDF tooling, …).

A 5-step deployment playbook for many sites

Step 1 · Inventory client UA traffic before you sell

Run agent402-tollbooth in observe mode on each candidate site for 7-14 days. The gate classifies every request as human-vs-crawler and counts what would have been charged — but never returns 402. This gives you a real number to put in the client deck instead of an industry-average guess.

import { createTollbooth } from "agent402-tollbooth";
app.use(createTollbooth({ observe: true }));

Or as a Cloudflare Worker / Next.js middleware — see Pay-per-crawl Walkthrough. When you flip on enforcement, the same code starts returning 402; nothing about the classifier changes.

Step 2 · Pick the right charge mode per client

Mode	Who pays	When to use it
bots (default)	The 25 known AI/LLM crawler UAs	News publishers, blogs, anyone who still wants Googlebot/Bingbot. Pick this by default.
all	Anyone but a free() match	API endpoints, paywalled APIs, anything where you don't want passive scraping
strict	Anyone without a real-browser UA + HTML Accept	Premium content where you accept some false-positive friction

Configure per-site via the mode option or the TOLLBOOTH_MODE env. You can also override with custom charge(req) / free(req) predicates for client-specific allowlists (e.g. "always free for the client's monitoring bot").

Step 3 · One wallet per client, one shared stats sink

Each client site sets its own payTo wallet — the USDC settles direct to the client, never to you. For multi-site rollup, point every site's statsSink at the same HTTP endpoint (your hosted dashboard on Tollbooth Cloud, or your own ingest service). The OSS gate ships both kvStatsSink (Cloudflare KV, per-Worker) and httpStatsSink (any HTTP endpoint).

import { createTollbooth, httpStatsSink } from "agent402-tollbooth";

app.use(createTollbooth({
  payTo: process.env.CLIENT_USDC_WALLET,
  price: "$0.002",
  observe: true,                                  // Phase 1
  statsSink: httpStatsSink({
    url: "https://stats.your-agency.com/ingest",
    token: process.env.TOLLBOOTH_INGEST_TOKEN,
    siteId: "client-acme",                        // tag for multi-site rollup
  }),
}));

The wire format is documented in tollbooth/sinks.js — it's minute-level aggregate counters per siteId, never per-request data. You can ingest into Postgres, ClickHouse, BigQuery, or just keep it in KV.

Step 4 · Set per-client alert thresholds

Cloud Team and Agency tiers let you set per-site alert rules without code. The defaults you'll want for most clients:

• Spike alert: charged requests in last hour > 5× the trailing-7-day median → email + Slack. Catches a new crawler campaign before it racks up cost (or, in observe mode, before it gobbles content).
• Settlement alert: any settled USDC > $0 → email. The first time a client's wallet gets paid is the moment that converts the client from "interested" to "evangelist."
• Health alert: classification rate (charged / total) drops to 0 for

  30 min → email. Means either the gate broke or you got knocked offline.

Step 5 · Monthly client report

The Cloud Team plan ships a monthly PDF per siteId with:

• Total requests, classified bot %, top 5 bot user-agents
• USDC settled this month, lifetime USDC settled (linked to a Basescan proof URL — clients love trustless evidence)
• Most-charged paths (which content is most attractive to AI crawlers — doubles as a content-strategy signal)
• A graph of bot share over time (the chart you put in next quarter's retainer renewal deck)

You can also pull the same data via the /api/cloud/report API (Team tier and up) to drop into your existing reporting stack.

Deploying across heterogeneous client stacks

Client stack	Recommended deployment
Node / Express	app.use(createTollbooth(...)) directly. ~5 min.
Next.js	middleware.ts template at tollbooth/deploy/nextjs. ~5 min.
Anything behind Cloudflare	Cloudflare Worker template at tollbooth/deploy/cloudflare. ~10 min, KV-backed, no origin change.
WordPress	agent402-tollbooth-wp plugin (beta — see tollbooth/deploy/wordpress). Upload, activate, paste your wallet, done.
Any other backend	Run the package as a reverse proxy: TOLLBOOTH_UPSTREAM=https://origin.example.com agent402-tollbooth. Drop into a Docker compose.
Static (Netlify / Vercel)	Sit a Cloudflare Worker in front. The Worker template works unchanged.

The portability is the agency selling point: your install playbook is the same gate on any of the above stacks, just a different deploy target. You're not selling a CDN — you're selling AI-crawl monetization that survives a hosting migration.

White-label setup (Agency plan)

1. Create a CNAME record: tollbooth.your-agency.com → cloud.agent402.tools.
2. In the Agency dashboard, register the subdomain. We provision a TLS cert (Let's Encrypt) and serve your branded dashboard at the CNAME.
3. Set your agency name + logo. The dashboard, the monthly PDF, and the alert emails all show your brand. The footer says "powered by Agent402" — that's the only attribution.

What we don't do (so you can plan around it)

• We don't email or sell to your clients. Cloud customer-of-record is the agency on Team/Agency plans. Your client never sees our checkout.
• We don't take a cut of settled USDC. Ever. The protocol's non-custodial promise is structural, not aspirational. Your client's wallet is the only address that ever holds their pay-per-crawl revenue.
• We don't ship a "managed bot intelligence" feed. The classifier is the static UA list in tollbooth/bots.js plus the strict heuristic; we don't run a SaaS-fed signature service. If a new AI crawler shows up, you (or a community PR) add it to the list.

Apply

• Pricing + plan comparison: agent402.tools/tollbooth/cloud
• Waitlist (pre-launch — anyone in gets the launch price for life): link on the Cloud page
• Partner program application: also on the Cloud page (separate form)
• Questions: open an issue on the repo

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See also:

• Pay-per-crawl (the Tollbooth) — protocol-level reference
• Pay-per-crawl Walkthrough — 30-minute install guide for a single site
• Security Model — what the gate does and doesn't protect against