L402 · Bitcoin Lightning · No node required

Add Lightning
payments to
any API.

Any HTTP API. Any endpoint. Any price in sats.
Your gateway is live in under 10 minutes.

Get your gateway → See a live 402 →
terminal — L402 payment flow
$# 1. Hit your gateway endpoint
$curl -X POST https://parsebit-lnd.fly.dev/c/your-id/analyse

# ← HTTP 402 Payment Required
WWW-Authenticate: L402 token="...", invoice="lnbc500..."

# 2. Pay the invoice. 3. Retry with proof
$curl -X POST https://parsebit-lnd.fly.dev/c/your-id/analyse \
     -H "Authorization: L402 <token>:<preimage>"

# ← HTTP 200 — your API response
HTTP 200 OK
{"result": "..."}
How it works

Three steps to your first paid request.

01
Register your API
Tell us your API URL, the endpoints you want to gate, and your price per call in satoshis.
POST /gateway/register { "api_base_url": "https://your-api.com", "endpoints": [{ "path": "/analyse", "price_sats": 500 }] }
02
Get your gateway URL
We provision a unique path prefix on our Lightning gateway instantly. No DNS changes required.
gateway_url: https://parsebit-lnd.fly.dev /c/your-id/analyse → Forwards to your API → L402-gated at 500 sats
03
Earn sats per request
Clients pay a Lightning invoice automatically. You earn 98% of every transaction, paid monthly.
1,000 requests × 500 sats = 500,000 sats routed Your cut (98%): = 490,000 sats / month
Pricing

2% of volume.
Nothing else.

2%
of transaction volume — no monthly fee, no minimum to start
Unlimited endpoints per gateway
Any price from 1 sat upward
Instant provisioning — live in minutes
No Lightning node required on your end
Dashboard with live request stats
Monthly billing above 10,000 sat threshold
L402-compliant — works with any Lightning wallet
Compatible with autonomous AI agents
Worked example — 1,000 requests/day at 500 sats
Client pays per request510 sats
You earn per request500 sats
Boltwork fee per request10 sats (2%)
Monthly requests (30 days)30,000
Your monthly earnings15,000,000 sats
Boltwork monthly fee300,000 sats
Questions

Straight answers.

Do I need to run a Lightning node?+
No. Boltwork runs the Lightning infrastructure — LND + Aperture — on our servers. You just point us at your existing HTTP API. Your clients need a Lightning wallet to pay, but you need no Bitcoin infrastructure at all.
What happens if the Lightning node goes offline?+
We run on Fly.io with LND connected to multiple neutrino peers for resilience. If the node goes down, the gateway returns a 503 — clients will retry. We monitor 24/7 and target under 15 minutes recovery time. This is a managed self-hosted node, not AWS multi-region. We're transparent about that.
How does the 2% fee actually work?+
It's baked into the Lightning invoice price. If you set your endpoint price at 500 sats, clients are charged 510 sats. You earn 500 sats, Boltwork keeps 10 sats. Fees are collected once per month when your accumulated balance exceeds 10,000 sats — we send you a Lightning invoice for the Boltwork cut.
What is L402 and will my clients support it?+
L402 is an HTTP payment protocol: your server returns 402 with a Lightning invoice, the client pays, and retries with the preimage as a Bearer token. Any Lightning wallet works for manual use. For autonomous AI agents, frameworks like boltwork-mcp and Alby support L402 natively.
Can AI agents use this automatically?+
Yes — that's the original design goal. Agents that support L402 will automatically discover, pay, and use your gateway without human intervention. Your gated API becomes accessible to the entire autonomous agent ecosystem.
Get started

Your gateway,
live in minutes.

Fill in the form — no payment details needed. Your gateway is provisioned instantly.

Must be publicly accessible. We'll verify it's reachable during registration.
Optional — we'll contact you when fees are due if not set.
[ {"path": "/summarise", "method": "POST", "price_sats": 500, "description": "Summarise a document"}, {"path": "/translate", "method": "POST", "price_sats": 150, "description": "Translate text"} ]
price_sats: 1–1,000,000. method: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, or *
No credit card. No account setup. Instant activation.