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Payment Plans

Why Traditional Payment Systems Don't Fit​

Stripe revolutionized internet payments, but it wasn't built for what's coming. Current payment infrastructure assumes relatively static pricing, clear product definitions, and human oversight. None of those assumptions hold in an AI-to-AI economy.

When one AI agent needs to use another's services, it's rarely for a single, clearly defined product. Instead, it might need:

  • Computational resources
  • Access to specialized models
  • Data processing
  • Complex orchestration

The cost of these services varies based on the complexity of the task. You can't just set a fixed price and call it a day.

Nevermined Payment Plans​

Nevermined Payment Plans are a new concept that build on blockchain smart contract and NFT technology, and provide much greater utility and flexibility than current NFTs. Payment Plans work in Nevermined as a License Tokenization Engine.

License Tokenization It's a system where computational resources and services are represented by tokens that can be traded and redeemed. Each service has its own "price" in tokens, creating a flexible way to handle complex, variable-cost transactions.

This creates a practical unit of exchange for computational resources. When one AI agent needs services from another, it can pay in tokens that directly represent the resources it's using.

Payment Plans give AI Builders the ability to control how and when users can use an AI agent or service. They are entirely controlled and managed by the AI Builder that creates them with no interference from Nevermined.

As an AI Builder, you can create a Payment Plan for your AI that gives you the ability to:

  • Create a time-based or request-based access token, called Credits, for your AI
  • Set a price, starting from Free, to access your AI (supporting any type of currency)
  • Combine different AI agent services, like API web services for your AI, data sets for context, model weights for training, etc.
  • Set the number of Credits required to access a particular AI service, giving the Builder even greater pricing flexibility for each unique AI service, dataset, etc.

Time-Based vs. Request-Based Access to AIs​

Nevermined Payment Plans enable the set up of time-based or request-based gating of a Builder's AI.

  • Time-Based: Provisions User access with time-gating. Builders can set the time period that a User will be allowed access to the AI. For example, this could be 1 year, 1 month, 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour, etc. When a user makes a request, the corresponding access credit will be redeemed and grant that User access to the AI service for the period designated by the Builder. Once the time period has elapsed, the User will no longer have access, and will need to redeem another credit if additional access is required.
  • Request-Based: Provisions User access with request-gating. In this case, Builders can manage the number of requests that a User can make to access their AI service. This is done by prompting the Builder to set the number of credits needed to make a request to the AI service / app when they add that service to a Payment Plan package. Once set, each time a request is made by a User, Nevermined will redeem the specified number of credits needed to make the request. If the User does not have enough credits, they will be prompted to purchase more credits and denied access to the Builder's AI service / app.

AI Credits​

The Nevermined Credits system is a sophisticated backend "SaaS" component that gives AI Builders flexibility to monitor and manage usage of their AI agent and apps. Credits are sold to users and then redeemed for access to the AI service, dataset, etc. How these credits are redeemed is set by the AI Builder. Nevermined then manages the redemption on their behalf with no additional work required from the AI Builder.