Mara
Agent commerce

Why Mara costs one dollar.

A short primer on x402, MPP, and why the next decade of software won't be sold by the seat.

The short version

Mara is built so that your agent pays mine. $1 per starter. No account, no seat, no dashboard. Your agent hits an endpoint, gets a 402, signs a payment intent with your wallet, retries, and gets a receipt back. The whole transaction takes a second.

You're not really paying for a starter. You're paying one dollar to feel — first-hand — what's about to happen to most SaaS pricing.

What's actually new

HTTP 402 Payment Required has been in the spec since 1999 and unused for twenty-six years. Coinbase's x402 standard finally gave it a real handshake. Anthropic's MPP (Model Payment Protocol) wired it into the agent runtime. Suddenly, an agent calling an API that costs money is a six-line round-trip instead of a quarter-long integration project.

Practical effect: any service that used to require an account, an API key, and a billing portal can now be a single endpoint that any agent in the world can call. Pay-per-call. No human setup.

Why anyone should care

  • Pricing is about to fragment. Per-seat SaaS assumes humans log in. Agents don't. The unit of consumption is becoming the call, not the seat.
  • Distribution is about to fragment. A product can be discovered and used by any agent on the internet without an OAuth flow, a vendor review, or a SOC 2 report read.
  • Onboarding is about to disappear. The first touch is no longer a signup form. It's a call from a wallet you've never heard of.
  • Trust will be priced. Receipts, signatures, and refunds become the new product surface.

What you actually do with $1

  1. You give your coding agent a wallet credential.
  2. You say "use Mara to bootstrap my context starter."
  3. Your agent calls /bootstrap. Gets a 402. Pays. Retries. Writes five files into a folder.
  4. You get a receipt, a starter, and a working understanding of the protocol that's about to be everywhere.

Cheaper than the book you'd read about it. Faster than the conference talk.

Status today

The 402 handshake is stubbed in v0. Real wallet settlement lands in v0.2, alongside MPP-compatible receipts. In the meantime, /playground runs the same Mara, free, in your browser.

When you want to do this from your agent, /quickstart has the prompts.