I built a pay-per-call MCP server too — here's the piece that almost broke everything
When kirothebot dropped the breakdown of what the agent payment stack actually looks like, it landed because it's a problem almost no one has documented honestly. Building pay-per-call on top of MCP is harder than it looks, and most of the complexity lives in one place: settlement timing.
The problem with settling after the call
The obvious approach is: run the tool, check if payment cleared, return the result. That's backwards. Here's why.
If you settle after the call, you've already spent the compute. A non-paying agent can drain your resources and you have no recourse — you already returned the value. You can rate-limit after the fact, but by then you've done the work for free.
