Enable true pay-per-use pricing

The challenge with traditional payment rails

Digital services are increasingly shifting toward usage-based models, where users pay only for what they consume. This includes everything from API calls and AI inference requests to streaming content, and IoT services. Yet traditional payment rails were never designed for extremely small, frequent payments, making microtransactions impractical or impossible for most businesses today.

Card networks apply fixed fees to every transaction, making any payment under a dollar uneconomical. Even instant rails like FedNow, while cheaper than cards, cannot support usage-based billing where each action costs only a few cents. This forces many digital products into subscriptions or prepaid balances instead of offering the more user-friendly and transparent pay-as-you-go model.

How stablecoins solve this

Stablecoins change this dynamic by enabling payments that cost a fraction of a cent and settle in seconds, making true microtransactions economically feasible at scale. They achieve this by removing the chain of intermediaries found in traditional payment rails, eliminating the delays, costs, and failure points that make small, frequent payments impractical today.

Programmability further expands what microtransactions can support. Smart contracts can meter usage, enforce payment rules, and top up wallet balances automatically. Developers can charge per API request, per compute cycle, or per any digital action, without building custom billing logic or relying on intermediaries.

Microtransactions also unlock machine-to-machine payments. Autonomous agents, bots, and IoT devices can pay for data, services, or compute in real time without human intervention. A device can pay another device for sensor data; an AI agent can pay for inference or model access; a drone can pay for map segments or airspace permissions.

Stablecoins also enable pay-as-you-go digital commerce for consumers. Instead of monthly subscriptions, consumers can pay per article, per minute of video, per chapter of a book, or per stream of a song. Creators and platforms can monetize content more flexibly, while users pay only for what they actually consume.

Benefits beyond speed and cost

From a developer's perspective, building microtransaction-powered services is becoming increasingly straightforward. Stablecoins provide a simple, programmable payment primitive. At the same time, new protocols are emerging that standardize usage-based payments, authorization, and settlement, making it even easier to launch pay-per-use applications on top of stablecoin rails.

Finally, onchain microtransactions improve reconciliation. Instead of aggregating thousands of small events into batched invoices that must be reconciled manually, stablecoins provide a unified ledger of each individual payment. This reduces operational overhead and simplifies financial reporting for businesses handling large volumes of small-value transactions.

Ultimately, stablecoin-powered microtransactions are not simply about reducing payment friction. They unlock new business models built around real-time data and usage. By enabling instant, sub-cent payments, stablecoins let companies price, deliver, and monetize digital services in ways that were never feasible before, creating meaningful competitive advantages for those who adopt them early.

Building with Tempo

True microtransactions require a blockchain that eliminates the economic floor of traditional payment fees. Tempo's architecture is designed to make sub-cent payments viable, unlocking entirely new business models for digital services, APIs, and content platforms. If you are calculating the economics of usage-based billing or machine-to-machine payments, we can help you run the numbers and explore the technical feasibility of building on Tempo.