Economic Access Control (EAC)

Economic Access Control. Not “Who Are You?” — “What Can You Afford?”

RBAC asks for identity. EAC asks for a budget. Your AI agents are spending money, calling APIs, and making decisions — with zero economic constraints. SatGate enforces Economic Access Control: observe every call, control every budget, and charge for access to your high-value APIs.

The Enterprise Buying Committee

Risk. Margins. Growth. Three buyers, one platform.

One platform, three perspectives. SatGate aligns security, finance, and growth under a single pane of glass.

CISO

Economic Access Control

The problem: A compromised AI agent gets inside the perimeter and spams a sensitive database at machine speed, bypassing traditional rate limits.

“SatGate provides a deterministic, cryptographic kill-switch. We don't just alert you — we hard-cap agent spend before the blast radius expands.”

Metrics that matter:

Reduce risk of runaway agent misuse and unauthorized spend

CFO

Deterministic Cost Control

The problem: Unpredictable AI bills. An infinite loop on an expensive MCP tool burns thousands over a weekend. No one notices until the invoice arrives.

“SatGate ends faith-based accounting for AI. We enforce hard, real-time dollar caps on every agent and tool — turning unpredictable AI costs into predictable, hard-capped OpEx.”

Metrics that matter:

Eliminate a major class of unbounded agent spend and AI bill shock

CEO / CRO

Monetizing the Agentic Web

The problem: Getting left behind as the internet shifts from human-to-human commerce to machine-to-machine commerce. Your APIs are valuable — but you're giving them away.

“SatGate turns your IT infrastructure from a cost center into an automated storefront. Expose APIs to external AI agents and charge micropayments for every call via L402.”

Metrics that matter:

Net-new revenue from machine-to-machine API transactions

Three Modes. One Gateway.

Start with visibility. Add control when you're ready. Monetize when it makes sense.

FREE

Observe

See every API call, every token, every agent — across MCP servers, REST APIs, and LLM endpoints. MCP proxy tracks per-tool costs in real time. Full visibility with zero enforcement.

  • ✓ Real-time request logging
  • ✓ Cost attribution dashboards
  • ✓ Agent inventory
  • ✓ Anomaly detection

Control

Set budgets per agent, per MCP tool, per team. Hard enforcement — agents get 402'd when budgets run out. Delegation hierarchies for sub-agents.

  • ✓ Per-agent budget limits
  • ✓ Token scope enforcement
  • ✓ Rate limiting by team
  • ✓ Automatic revocation

Charge

Monetize your APIs with L402. Sub-second Lightning settlement, per-request pricing, no chargebacks. Machine-native payments.

  • ✓ L402 protocol (HTTP 402 + Lightning)
  • ✓ Per-request micropayments
  • ✓ Sub-second settlement
  • ✓ No chargebacks, no invoices
ObserveControlCharge
Real-World Scenario

The Rogue Intern Story

Friday afternoon. An intern creates an API token "to test something." By Monday, $47,000 in OpenAI charges. Here's how SatGate changes the ending.

FRIDAY 4:47 PM

Intern Creates Token

"Just a quick test." Generates an API token with no budget limit, no scope restriction, no expiry.

SATURDAY — SUNDAY

Agent Burns Budget

The test script runs in a loop. 2.3 million API calls. $47,000 in compute. Nobody notices.

WITH SATGATE: FRIDAY 4:48 PM

CISO Gets Alert

SatGate detects anomalous token creation. Budget threshold hit after $50. Alert fires in 60 seconds.

FRIDAY 4:49 PM

CTO Revokes Token

One click. Token revoked globally. All child tokens die instantly. Total cost: $50 instead of $47,000.

AUTOMATIC

Audit Trail Complete

Full timeline: who created the token, what it accessed, when it was revoked. Compliance-ready export.

Can turn a $47,000 weekend incident into a $50 policy event. 2 minutes to resolution.

SatGate Observe mode would have caught this for free.

60+ Dashboard Pages. Day One.

Real-time visibility into every agent, every API call, every dollar.

Usage Dashboard

Usage Dashboard

Real-time API call volume, latency percentiles, error rates. Broken down by agent, team, and endpoint.

CFO Chargeback Report

CFO Chargeback Report

Automated cost attribution. See exactly which team spent what on which API. Export to CSV or push to your billing system.

Security Dashboard

Security Dashboard

Active tokens, anomalous behavior, blocked requests, revocation history. CISO-ready at a glance.

Compliance Export

Compliance Export

SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA audit trails. Every token lifecycle event, every access decision, timestamped and immutable.

Hierarchical Token Delegation

Tokens flow down. Authority narrows. Every level is scoped, budgeted, and time-limited.

Root Token

CTO • All scopes • $∞ budget

Engineering VP

api:eng:*

$10k/mo

Data Science VP

api:data:*

$25k/mo

Marketing VP

api:mkt:*

$5k/mo

RAG Agent

api:data:read

$500/day24h
Code Agent

api:eng:deploy

$200/day8h
Support Bot

api:mkt:chat

$50/day1h
Analytics

api:data:query

$1k/day12h

Scoped

Narrower than parent

Budgeted

Hard spending limits

Time-Limited

Auto-expire by policy

Delegatable

Agents can sub-delegate

Single Go Binary. Zero Dependencies.

Deploy anywhere in minutes. No JVM, no runtime, no dependency hell. One binary that runs on anything.

Docker

ghcr.io/satgate-io/gateway

Kubernetes

Helm chart included

Terraform

IaC modules ready

SaaS

cloud.satgate.io

Hybrid Mode

Gateway runs in your VPC. Dashboard in our cloud (or yours). Your data never leaves your infrastructure. The best of both worlds: self-hosted security, managed convenience.

The Core Problem

The Tragedy of the Commons — Inside Your Company

Every shared internal API is a commons. When agents have unlimited access, they over-consume. The team that built the service pays the infrastructure bill. The team running the agent gets free compute. Nobody optimizes because nobody pays.

Without EAC

  • • Agent team says “we need unlimited access”
  • • Platform team absorbs the cost
  • • No signal on which calls are valuable vs. wasteful
  • • Agents spam the most powerful tool because it's free
  • • IT remains a cost center forever

With EAC

  • • Every agent gets a budget — hard cap, no exceptions
  • • High-risk actions cost more, loops hit budget ceiling and stop
  • • Agents naturally optimize for efficiency
  • • Platform teams become measurable profit centers
  • • You can't out-smart an AI swarm, but you can hard-cap its wallet
The Opportunity

Your Internal APIs Are an Untapped Market

Every internal service — databases, search indexes, ML models — has a real cost per call. EAC makes that cost visible and enforceable. Suddenly your internal tooling isn't overhead. It's a marketplace.

📊

Price Discovery

When every call has a cost, you learn which internal APIs are actually valuable vs. over-provisioned.

⚖️

Natural Load Balancing

Expensive calls get used thoughtfully. Cheap calls get used freely. The market allocates resources better than any policy doc.

💰

Profit Centers

Platform teams charge for what they provide. Agent teams budget for what they consume. IT finally has a P&L.

“Stop giving AI agents an all-you-can-eat buffet pass.”
Give them a budget. Let economics do what policy never could.

Live Demo

See It Work — Right Now

SatGate Mint exchanges workload identity tokens for capability-bearing macaroons. No secrets to manage. No tokens to rotate. Try it live.

Launch Interactive Demo

3-step flow: Mock IdP → Mint Exchange → Verified Macaroon

From Demo to Thousands of Agents

The same exchange you just saw works identically at scale. No secrets management. No credential rotation. Identity is the credential.

1

Define trust policies

Map identity claims to budgets, scopes, and TTLs. One policy per agent class — not per agent instance.

2

Agents self-provision

Each agent reads its environment identity (K8s SA, IAM role, OIDC token) and exchanges it for a macaroon. One API call. No human in the loop.

3

Observe everything

Every tool call, every credit spent, every agent session — visible in real-time on your dashboard. When you're ready, flip to enforcement.

# Agent startup (3 lines — works in any runtime)
IDENTITY=$(cat /var/run/secrets/tokens/satgate-token)
TOKEN=$(curl -s -X POST $SATGATE_MINT_URL \
  -d "{\"credentials\": \"$IDENTITY\"}" | jq -r '.token')
export SATGATE_TOKEN=$TOKEN
# That's it. Agent connects through SatGate with budget-scoped access.

Ready to govern your AI agents?

We're working with 10 enterprises to build the governance layer for the agent economy. Start with free Observe mode—no risk, full visibility.

Free Observe mode • 5-minute setup • No credit card required