Guides to building agents that handle money
Learn how agent payments work, where controls belong, and how to test them safely.
The essentials
Understand agent payments, choose budgets, configure controls, and manage paid API calls.
What are agentic payments?
How AI agents pay for services, make purchases, and issue refunds, and where spending controls come in.
Spend management for AI agents
Set budgets, choose who agents can pay, and decide when they need approval.
How to control AI agent spending
Set up spending limits, approvals, and payment records before your agent uses real money.
x402 and API spend controls for AI agents
Set limits on paid API calls so repeated requests stay within budget.
From the blog
See how spending controls work in a commerce agent.
Try Conto with Anthropic Commerce Agent Templates
We added Conto spending controls to Anthropic’s commerce agent templates. Try the shopping, travel, and ticketing demos to see what happens at checkout.
Read articleExplore by team
Product, finance, operations, and engineering teams each touch a different part of the path from agent action to approved spend.
For product teams
Decide which agent actions need a person in the loop and what the user sees when one does.
ExploreFor finance and ops
See which limit fired, who approved the exception, and whether the payment settled, all from one record.
ExploreFor developers
Build policy checks, budgets, wallets, and x402 handling into the request path.
ExploreKey payment controls
Find the product details for the controls covered in these guides.