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# Micropayments \[Sub-cent payments without the fee problem]

Micropayments have been impractical because traditional payment rails charge fixed fees that exceed the transaction value. MPP makes sub-cent payments viable through stablecoin settlement and off-chain payment sessions. Buyers—including autonomous [agents](/use-cases/agentic-payments)—pay per request or per token without subscriptions or minimums.

## Why micropayments failed before

Credit card processing charges a fixed fee per transaction—typically $0.30 plus 2.9%. That fee structure makes anything under ~$1 uneconomical for the merchant, and anything under ~$0.50 a net loss.

Subscription bundling became the workaround. Instead of charging $0.001 per article or $0.0001 per query, services charge $10–20/month for unlimited access. Users overpay for access they don't fully use, and services lose potential customers who'd pay for occasional use but won't commit to a subscription.

## How MPP enables micropayments

MPP provides two mechanisms depending on the transaction size:

* **One-time charges**—For per-request payments above a few cents, MPP uses on-chain stablecoin transfers on [Tempo](/payment-methods/tempo). Transaction fees on Tempo are sub-cent, so a $0.05 charge remains economical. The buyer pays and receives the resource in the same HTTP request.

* **[Sessions](/payment-methods/tempo/session)**—For sub-cent payments (per-token LLM billing, per-query search), MPP uses off-chain payment channels. The buyer reserves funds in a session once, and later requests use signed vouchers—no on-chain transaction per request, so per-request fees are near-zero. Settlement happens periodically, so thousands of $0.0001 interactions cost a single transaction fee.

## Use cases

* **Per-token LLM inference**—Pay for the tokens you generate, not a monthly seat
* **Per-query web search**—Charge fractions of a cent per search result
* **Per-pixel image generation**—Bill based on resolution and compute used
* **Metered data access**—Price API calls by the row, record, or byte returned
* **Pay-per-article content**—Readers pay cents per article instead of subscribing

## Next steps

[Charge](/guides/one-time-payments): One payment per request, settled on-chain

[Session](/guides/usage-based): Sub-cent billing per request or per token

[Pay for sessions](/guides/pay-for-sessions): Open a session and pay per request as a buyer