The Economic Firewall for AI Agents

Control what agents
can spend.

SatGate is the economic control plane for AI agents. Observe, budget, and charge for every request — before it touches your API.

Drop-in gateway. Sub-ms overhead. Start in Observe mode — enforce when ready.

REST · GraphQL · MCP Gateway · Sidecar · MCP Proxy Sub-ms verification Stripe / ERP + Lightning Open source
hero_demo.py — Live Demo
🚗💨 EZ Pass — live metering

Agents badge in once. Every request — verified, metered, budget-enforced.

See how it works

See SatGate in Action

Agents spend without limits. SatGate stops that. 30 seconds.

From Observation to Autonomy

First, govern your own house. Then open the gates — on your terms.

DEFAULT PROTECTION

Cryptographic Capability Verification

Always-on for non-PUBLIC routes

Every protected route requires valid credentials (Macaroons). Capabilities, caveats, delegation, and revocation—built into the protocol, not bolted on.

✓ Capabilities + Caveats✓ Delegation chains✓ Instant revocation✓ Tamper-evident audit

Your Agents

FREE
Protected by default →

Observe (Fiat)

verify → allow → meter/log

Start here. No workflow changes. No budget enforcement yet. Just visibility.

  • ✓ Audit mode — zero disruption to existing agents
  • ✓ Usage attribution by team and cost center
  • ✓ See exactly where money is going before you change anything
  • ✓ Zero latency impact
PRO
Protected by default →

Control (Fiat402)

verify → enforce budget → allow

Now enforce it. Hard budget caps — when it hits zero, agents stop.

  • ✓ Real-time budget enforcement
  • ✓ Works with Stripe, ERP — no crypto required
  • ✓ Per-agent spending caps

Their Agents — when you're ready

PRO
Protected by default →

Charge (L402)

verify → payment proof → allow

Open your API to the autonomous agent swarm — on your terms.

  • ✓ No registration, no API key — just pay and go
  • ✓ Bitcoin Lightning micropayments (instant)
  • ✓ Per-request pricing at sub-cent granularity
  • ✓ Autonomous agents discover and pay for access

Why API Keys Break in Agent Chains

API keys are all-or-nothing. Delegated capability tokens let you set any budget, scope, and expiry per agent — and agents can't escalate beyond what they're given. Trust flows down, never up.

PUBLIC is the explicit opt-out for probes (/healthz), docs, and webhooks. Everything else is protected by default.

🚗💨 HOW IT WORKS

Badge in once. Fly through every gate.

Agents get a credential at startup — like mounting an EZ Pass. Every request after that flows through the gateway: verified, metered, no slowdowns.

Agent StartsK8s / AWS / OIDC
MintBadge in (once)
EZ PassCapability token
Toll GateVerify · Meter · Budget
UpstreamYour API

No identity lookups on the hot path. No per-request auth round-trips. Just cryptographic verification at wire speed.

RESEARCH VALIDATION

Built for the agent delegation era

Google DeepMind's recent research on intelligent AI delegation concludes that agents need attenuated capability tokens — specifically macaroons — to safely delegate tasks across trust boundaries. They propose Delegation Capability Tokens with cryptographic caveats that restrict what each sub-agent can access.

SatGate already does this.

Scoped Authority

Agents only get the permissions they need, attenuated at each delegation layer.

Budget Ceilings

Per-agent and per-route economic policy, enforced before upstream execution.

Immediate Enforcement

When limits hit, requests stop. Not after billing. Now.

We didn't build this because of a paper. We built it because it's how machine-to-machine authorization has to work. The research just confirms the architecture.Tomasev et al., 2026

Where It Fits

Three deployment modes. Drop-in. No rip-and-replace.

STANDARD

CDN / WAF
SatGate
Your API

REST, GraphQL, any HTTP endpoint

SIDECAR

Existing Gateway
Legacy traffic
SatGate
Your APIs

Route only agent traffic through SatGate

MCP PROXY

AI Agents
SatGate MCP Proxy
MCP Servers / Tools

Per-tool budgets, delegation trees

How It Works

Four steps to protect your API. No code changes required.

1

Pick Your Policy

Define routes with economic policies. PUBLIC for probes/docs, protected for everything else.

routes:
  - path: /healthz
    policy: public
  - path: /v1/*
    policy: observe
  - path: /premium/*
    policy: charge
2

Apply Config

Apply when ready. Version history + audit log. Rollback if needed.

v3 (applied) ← current
v2 (available)
v1 (available)

Audit: who, when, diff
3

Point Your DNS

Use *.satgate.cloud or your custom domain. Traffic flows through SatGate.

# Your domain
api.yoursite.com
  CNAME → satgate.cloud

# Or use ours
yourapp.satgate.cloud
4

See Verified Traffic

Real-time: verified vs challenged. Enable Charge policy when ready for revenue.

Verified:   1,203 requests
Challenged: 12,847 (402s)
Metered:    $847 usage

→ Enable Charge policy?