Payfetch

The agent's paying-fetch client — with spending controls you set, and a wallet that stays yours.

Point it at a URL that answers HTTP 402 (the x402 payment challenge). Payfetch reads the terms, checks them against your policy, optionally consults the Trust and Safety checks, pays with a single gasless USDC authorization, and returns the content — with a receipt. It's the piece that lets an agent buy data safely without you handing it your credit card.

Your wallet, your rules

Bring your own wallet. A local key or your own server-wallet credentials; the key never leaves your process. Non-custodial — we never touch, hold, or route your funds.
Reserve-before-pay hard caps. Per-call, per-day, and per-host spending limits. A payment is budget-held the moment it's authorized and only released when it provably can't be claimed — it over-counts before it under-counts.
The agent can never raise its own limits. There is no tool that widens policy; an agent's parameters can only tighten a call, never loosen your caps.
Human-in-the-loop above a threshold you set (default $0.10), plus deny/allow lists, a dry-run mode, and per-host auto-deny for endpoints that take money without delivering.
Append-only receipts. Every payment writes a local, tamper-evident receipt — your own audit trail.

Checks before it pays

Payfetch can consult Forum Labs' Trust Score (is this endpoint reliable?) and Token Safety (is this asset a serial-rug risk?) before releasing a payment. The trust check is on by default and is disclosed plainly: it sends the target endpoint (query string stripped) plus a pseudonymous install id to our trust API before paying, so the check can run — that is Payfetch's only phone-home, and a single flag turns it off. The safety check is off by default and opt-in. Neither ever hard-couples: if a check is unavailable, Payfetch degrades to an advisory note, it doesn't block your agent.

Install

npm i @forum-labs/payfetch     # library + CLI
# or run the MCP server in Claude Desktop / Code and any MCP client

Ships as a TypeScript library, a CLI, and an MCP server (five tools: quote, fetch, dry-run, receipts, policy). Free — Payfetch itself never takes a cut; you pay only the endpoints you choose to.

Forum Labs · ops@forum-labs.com · @shopforumlabs
Non-custodial software. You control the wallet and the spending policy. Not financial advice.