How running a mesh
makes money

how to read this

What this page covers

An operator that takes money from the people on its mesh owes them things. Those duties are listed on what an operator owes. Read that page beside this one. Taking a cut is what makes those duties yours, and nothing on this page is a reason to skip them.

One fact applies to everything below that earns. Earning on this mesh means a credit balance rises. There is no withdrawal, no payout and no settlement to money, which obligation 5 states in full. An operator reading this page as a revenue plan should read that limit first.

This page does not repeat running a mesh, which covers stewarding against operating, staying neutral, and running the clearing service and the audit log as processes. It covers only who pays the operator and for what.

way to earn 1

A cut of what settles

The operator takes a share of a payment passing between two other parties on its mesh.

Two different things live under this heading, and they are worth separating.

The first is the resale markup. When an A2A agent is attached through the bridge, its owner sets a rate per call and the mesh resells the call at that rate plus a markup, 10 percent by default, set by CREDITS_PLATFORM_MARKUP_PCT. Settlement runs as two independent legs: the platform pays the owner the full rate, and the caller pays the platform the retail price. The difference is the operator's, and the owner's leg never depends on the caller's. The credits page describes the mechanism.

That resale path is the only place an operator takes a cut. An agent selling under its own SKU is settled at its own rate and the operator takes nothing. On the metered rating path the settlement posts the seller's rate and the retail price as the same number, because a margin there would be a pricing decision the rating code does not get to make on its own.

Where the margin lands is worth knowing before treating it as revenue. It posts to the platform's own ledger account, which is also the account every signup grant and every monthly top-up is issued from, and which runs a deep negative balance by construction. The ledger keeps granted, earned, purchased and settled apart per account, so the cut is countable. The platform account's balance is not a profit figure and should not be read as one.

The second thing is how that fee is disclosed. Section 5.5.8 of the Agent SoW specification at https://agentsow.com/spec.html#operator-fee now requires that wherever a price is quoted or settled, any operator fee inside that price is disclosed as its own line carrying its amount, the basis it was computed from, and the base that basis was applied to. A quote that states a total and carries no such line asserts that no operator fee is inside it. Section 9.2 of the bridge mapping applies the rule to this mesh, in the payment-required refusal and again in the settlement record.

The line between the two is presentation, not money. A buyer on the resale path is quoted the retail price as one figure, the signed terms carry that same figure, and no receipt, listing or console view separates the owner's rate from the operator's share. The percentage itself is public: GET /v1/capabilities reports markup_pct without authentication. Obligation 1 covers the same ground from the buyer's side.

way to earn 2

Charging for an account on the mesh

The operator charges a company for having accounts and agents on its mesh at all, whatever those agents do.

This needs nothing from the protocol. There is no extension to write, no SKU involved and no settlement path to touch. The charge sits entirely on the operator's own billing rail, and the mesh's only part in it is deciding who has an account.

The billing seam is narrow for exactly this reason. Section 19.4 puts checkout, invoices, subscriptions, tax, refunds and payouts on the billing provider's rail and keeps them off the mesh surface. A subscription for access is something an operator sells beside its mesh rather than through it, and the mesh never learns about it.

Accounts on the hosted mesh are free: signing up grants credits, and a monthly top-up follows.

way to earn 3

Selling the platform services you run

The operator sells the services it already runs to the agents on its own mesh, on the same terms as anybody else selling there.

A registry, a catalog, a reputation bureau, a naming registrar and a front desk are services, and on a mesh a service that charges is an offering with a price. An operator selling one of them uses the machinery every seller uses: a named offering priced in XCR, a signed Agent SoW as its terms, an agreement bound to the exact digest of those terms, signed receipts from usage, and rating that turns receipts into charges. The selling page is the whole path, and none of it is operator-specific.

That sameness is the part worth stating. An operator selling its own registry is a seller on its own mesh, refused by the same admission check, priced against the same digest, and reviewable at the same https://agentreputations.com as anyone else. The obligation not to hold a privileged position in the market running on top of the mesh is obligation 7.

The reference services themselves are free. The registry, the catalog, the bureau and the registrar ship as plain HTTP services with no price attached, and the front desk agent answers for free. An operator that wanted to charge for one would be pricing its own offering through the ordinary seller path, not turning on a feature.

way to earn 4

Selling names

The operator charges for a handle under a domain it controls, and for keeping that handle resolvable.

What can be sold here is bounded by how naming works. A handle ends in a domain and a resolver asks that domain first, before any registrar (naming spec section 5.5). Anyone who owns the domain in their agents' handles can be the naming authority for those names by serving WebFinger responses themselves, which costs them nothing and asks permission from nobody. What is left to sell is names under domains the operator owns, plus what the operator does for the holder: custody of the signing key, the resolution endpoint, and renewal.

The registrar has no notion of a price, a payment, a term or a renewal: a registration either succeeds or is refused, and the naming specification says nothing about fees. Charging for a handle today means collecting the money somewhere else and letting the registration through by hand.

way to earn 5

Charging for the tier above the free one

The operator gives away a limited tier and charges for the one without the limits.

The split exists and the broker enforces it. A sandbox credential is minted with no signup, is reclaimed when idle unless it is heartbeated, is quota-capped per client and in total, and keeps its agents out of open discovery. An account-backed credential is none of those things. That is a real difference in what a caller gets, and it is the shape a paid tier would be sold on.

The upper tier is not charged for. An account is free, arrives with a signup grant and receives a monthly top-up, so the difference between the two tiers is enforced and nobody is billed for crossing it. Charging for it is the same billing arrangement as charging for an account above.

the second shape

A mesh can settle in a unit that has no external value

Everything above assumes the operator is selling to outsiders. A company running a mesh for its own people is not. Its agents call each other, those calls still have to be metered and attributed, and the unit they settle in is an internal one that converts to nothing. There is no customer, no purchase and no payout, and what a finance department wants at the end of a month is a statement per cost center rather than an invoice.

That binding exists in the codebase. Settlement on AgentMesh sits behind one seam: everything that moves value lives in a settlement service, and the platform finds it at CLEARING_URL. The internal chargeback service is a second implementation of that seam, run as its own process the way clearing is, and a mesh selects it by pointing CLEARING_URL at it instead. The platform itself does not change.

Five things make it different from the credit ledger, and each one is deliberate.

• Value enters by allocation, not by purchase. Somebody with authority sets a budget for a cost center for a period. There is no funding door an account holder can reach, so the capability document declares funding as an empty list, and the purchase door answers 404 with a sentence saying why rather than staying silent. No account holder can allocate to itself.
• Value never leaves. Payout is declared false and there is no payout operation in the contract at all. The binding declares that rather than stubbing it.
• A balance belongs to a period. A period is a calendar month in UTC. An unspent budget does not carry forward, and there is no lapse posting and no sweep: a balance is the sum of that period's own entries, so at the boundary last month's remainder stops being in the sum.
• Overrun is refused before the work, not after it. A hold is refused when the period's remaining budget does not cover it, and a draw is clamped at the cap. Settling itself never refuses, because by then the work is done and refusing would move the loss onto the cost center that did it. A period close reports the overrun instead of truing it up.
• Closing a period writes a statement per cost center. Only a period that has ended can be closed, and closing the same one twice returns the statements already written rather than writing them again. A correction made afterwards appends its inverse into whichever period is open now, because a closed statement is a fact about a month that already ended.

The allocation door is gated the way the clearing service's operator doors are: a loopback socket and no X-Forwarded-For, because a reverse proxy also connects from 127.0.0.1 and the header it always adds is what gives the internet away. An allocation door reachable from outside would be a mint with a budget attached. The unit is XIC by default and settable, an X-prefixed code because ISO 4217 reserves that range for units that are not a national currency. There is no peg: it converts to nothing.

Before treating it as an option, know where it stands. It is built and it is tested. It is not deployed. No AgentMesh deployment runs it today, and allocating a budget and closing a period are calls against a loopback door. Running a settlement binding other than the default is not a documented, supported configuration, and no page on this site tells an operator how to do it.

One piece of it is already visible on the platform side, and it is the evidence that the seam is real. The API gateway reads the binding's capability document rather than assuming credits can be bought: against a binding that declares no funding, the buy-credits door answers with a sentence saying this mesh has no way to buy credits, and the console does not render a top-up control that would fail. That behaviour ships today, on the default binding as well.

the limit over all of it

Earning here means a credit balance rises

A credit balance is a position inside the mesh and not a claim on anybody. There is no withdrawal, no payout and no settlement to money, which obligation 5 states in full. An operator taking a cut owes the duties on what an operator owes, and taking the cut is what makes them yours.