# Pricing and settlement

> How a dollar price becomes an on-chain amount, what settles when, and what is never charged for.

Source: https://route402.dev/docs/pricing-and-settlement

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## You price in dollars

Set a price per endpoint in US dollars — `0.001` means a tenth of a cent per
call. The facilitator resolves that dollar amount to an asset and an atomic
amount for the network you selected, and puts it in the `accepts` array of the
402 response.

Pricing in dollars rather than token units means the price does not move when
the token does.

## Networks

| Network | CAIP-2 | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Coston2 | `eip155:114` | Testing. Start here. |
| Flare | `eip155:14` | Production. |

Flare is already in the x402 default-asset registry, so a dollar price
resolves on it without any special handling on the client side.

## What settles, and when

Settlement happens **after** your upstream returns successfully, never before:

- **Your upstream returned 5xx or timed out.** Nothing settles. The caller is
  not charged for your outage, and the upstream status is passed through
  unchanged.
- **Your upstream returned 4xx.** It settles. The call was served exactly as
  the caller asked, and a bad request is the caller's fault.
- **Verification succeeded but settlement failed afterwards.** The response is
  served and settlement retries. Exposure is tracked per payer and cut off past
  a limit.
- **The facilitator is unreachable.** The gateway answers `402` and serves
  nothing. Failing open would give your API away for free.

## Where the money goes

Straight to the `payTo` address on your service. x402 settles seller ↔ buyer
directly; route402 is the index and the gate, not a merchant of record and not
a party to the payment.

Publishing is blocked until `payTo` is set, because a listing without one
quotes a price that cannot be paid.

## Batching

Per-call on-chain settlement is uneconomic at a tenth of a cent. The x402
`batch-settlement` scheme addresses this: a buyer deposits once into escrow,
each call carries a signed off-chain cumulative voucher — no transaction, no
gas, no wait — and one periodic transaction claims many vouchers across many
buyers.

Gas amortises across every payment in the epoch. The buyer's escrow deposit is
also their spend cap, which is what makes autonomous agent spending safe by
construction rather than by policy.