Tollbooth

Demo

About

# Tollbooth: Pay-Per-Crawl Access Control Most websites today defend against bots with captchas or outright blocking. That frustrates AI agents, crawlers, and automation tools that want legitimate access. With **Tollbooth**, site owners don’t have to choose between “let everyone in” or “block them all.” Instead, they can charge a small fee for automated traffic. --- ## How It Works 1. **Bot requests a page** If the site requires payment, it responds with `HTTP 402 Payment Required`, including the cost in headers. 2. **Bot pays with X402** The agent automatically uses its wallet (managed via X402) to confirm payment intent. 3. **Site grants access** Once payment is verified, the site returns normal content—no captchas, no friction. 4. **On Flow: Subscriptions** Instead of paying per request, sites can configure recurring access windows (e.g., 30 seconds, 1 day, or a custom interval). This is implemented via Flow’s scheduled callbacks, which automatically handle subscription renewals. --- ## Why It’s Better * **For sites & publishers** Earn revenue from automated traffic instead of wasting resources on captchas or blocking. *(Coming soon: split payments between stakeholders like website owners and journalists.)* * **For bots & agents** No more captcha-solving farms, OCR hacks, or blocked sessions. Just pay a micro-fee or subscribe for seamless browsing. --- ## Features at a Glance * **Pay-per-crawl access** with X402 * **Subscription-based access** powered by Flow * **Expiration support** (access ends when time runs out unless renewed) * **Captcha fallback** for humans * **Planned: Revenue splitting** to automatically share fees across multiple parties

How it's made

## How It’s Made We built a lightweight edge proxy that routes all traffic through a **gate page**. Humans can pass through by solving a captcha, while bots are offered the option to pay a small fee using **Coinbase X402**. Once either path succeeds, the backend issues a **short-lived access token** that grants entry to the requested resource. Payments are processed via **X402 intents and webhooks**, with all verification handled in a minimal Node/TypeScript backend. On the subscription side, we used **Flow’s scheduled callbacks** to implement recurring access windows, so agents can pay once and continue browsing for the duration of their subscription. The stack is intentionally simple: * **Cloudflare Workers** → edge gate & traffic routing * **Node/TypeScript** → token issuance & payment verification * **Coinbase AgentKit** → wallet and payment abstraction * **Flow** → subscription scheduling and expiration handling We’ve kept the design hack-friendly and modular—no heavy bot-detection heuristics, just a clear binary choice: *solve a captcha or pay*. 👉 **Coming soon:** split-payment support, so revenue can be automatically shared between multiple parties (e.g. site owner and journalist).