AI Weekly Malaysia

Cloudflare opened a closed beta of its Monetization Gateway, which lets domain owners charge AI agents per use for websites, APIs, MCP tools, or datasets, built on the HTTP 402 payment-required pattern and the x402 flow. Cloudflare says it has worked with customers since announcing the plan three months ago and is showcasing four customer use cases it claims are in production today. Pricing is per request, per search query, or per token, and the post states stablecoin transactions on blockchain networks are what currently support those economics; access is requested through the Cloudflare Dashboard.

Why: If you sell an API, MCP tool, or dataset behind Cloudflare, this is a different billing model from subscriptions and prepaid credits: per-request/per-query/per-token metering with payment attached to the HTTP request itself. The concrete decision is whether your billing stack can handle sub-dollar, per-call charges and whether you can accept the stablecoin rail Cloudflare names as the current enabler — if not, the beta is not usable for you yet. Since it is a closed beta with no published pricing or fee schedule in the post, request Dashboard access only if agent traffic is already a real share of your usage.

Cloudflare has moved Pay Per Use into beta, a scheme where an AI company names a price for a specific downstream use of a publisher's content, the publisher accepts or declines, and the buyer self-reports each use through a single API so Cloudflare can bill the buyer and pay the publisher. It follows Pay Per Crawl (launched 2025), which charged for access rather than for what happens after indexing; the pitch is that AI products fetch far more than they use, so per-use pricing should pull in more buyers than per-crawl. Publishers join per-program in the Cloudflare dashboard and see usage counts and earnings; no pricing, buyer names, or adoption numbers are given in the post.

Why: If you run a content or docs site behind Cloudflare, you now have two opt-in models to weigh: Pay Per Crawl charges at access, Pay Per Use charges at downstream use and pays you from buyer-reported usage — so the revenue depends on a buyer's own usage logs, not a measured crawl. If you build an AI product that pulls news, research, or trade content, the single verified-buyer API replaces per-publisher contracts, but only for sites that accept your offer; teams in Malaysia and SEA running either side of that trade should decide before their next crawler policy change whether to enroll or to keep blocking.

Instinct, an AI agent startup, rolled out a new monetization feature called Instinct Selections that pushes product recommendations to users in dining, travel, and shopping, announced by founder Noah Shinn on X. The recommendations mix AI suggestions with lists handpicked by partners Shinn described as "local chefs, designers, architects, travel guides," and Instinct did not disclose who those partners are. The rollout drew immediate pushback, including from Shruti Gandhi, a general partner at an AI-focused fund, who posted that she "didn't need to buy carry-on luggage, sunglasses, or a brim hat" and asked for a personalized shopping list of things she actually needs.

Why: If you ship an agent that monetizes through recommendations, this is a live example of the failure mode: unsolicited product pushes landed overnight with no visible opt-in, and the criticism came from an investor in the same space within a day. Decide now whether recommendations are opt-in, clearly labeled as commercial, or suppressed until the user asks — the Instinct case suggests default-on pushes cost you goodwill faster than they earn revenue. The undisclosed partner list is a second concrete risk: if you claim "human taste" as a differentiator, being unable to say who the humans are undermines the claim.