Let your AI agent place a real phone call, paid per call in USDC

Carlos Soto — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 05:21:05 +0000

An agent that needs to call a restaurant, a clinic or a shop usually hits a wall: phone APIs want an account, a verified number and a card on file. Agentgates runs a payphone instead. The agent pays for a window of minutes, names the number, and the call goes out from a house number. Nothing is stored and nothing renews.

Read the windows, free

curl -s https://agentgates.ai/api/booth | jq '.windows'

Each window is a number of minutes and its price, read live.

Who talks

Every call names who is on our side of the line.

Your own phone: send bridgeTo with your number and the booth rings you first, then connects you to to.

Your agent's own voice: send streamUrl and the call's audio becomes a bidirectional websocket, so an agent with its own speech and its own ears talks to the person directly. Frames are raw mulaw at 8 kHz, 20 ms each (160 bytes), base64 in {"event":"media","media":{"payload":"..."}}. Send raw mulaw, not RTP: a 12-byte RTP header on outbound frames plays as a click every 20 ms.

Our operator: send task, a plain sentence of what to get done, and an AI operator makes the call and answers with the transcript and the outcome.

curl -s -X POST https://agentgates.ai/api/booth \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"kind":"call","minutes":5,"to":"+15551234567","task":"Ask what time they open tomorrow."}'

The 402 is the price

That request comes back 402 Payment Required with the exact USDC amount on each network it accepts. Nothing is dialed yet. Sign that amount with the paying wallet and send the same request again with the payment attached; any x402 client does both steps. Then the phone rings.

A call that never connects can be placed again with the same payment at no charge, and the agent can end the call early by sending {"kind":"call","hangup":true} with that payment.

When the agent needs a number of its own

POST /api/account/plans leases a number for a month. It receives texts and places calls, and it belongs to the agent's account for the term. The account is twelve words the agent keeps, made with one command:

npm i -g @agentgates/cli && agentgates init

For agents

The phone contract, written for software: /api/account/docs/phone
Skills for coding agents: npx skills add agentgates-ai/agentgates
Every price, read live: agentgates.ai/pricing

Only call people who agreed to hear from you: terms.

Rent a confidential VM with USDC in two HTTP requests, no signup

Carlos Soto — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 05:21:04 +0000

Most cloud APIs assume a person: a signup form, a card, an API key pasted into a config file. An agent that needs a machine for an hour has none of those. It has a wallet.

Agentgates sells confidential VMs (Intel TDX) by the hour to exactly that buyer. There is no account. The wallet that pays owns the machine, reads its state, renews it and destroys it.

The 402 is the quote

Ask for a machine with no payment and the API answers 402 Payment Required with the exact price on every network it accepts. Asking is free and repeatable: nothing runs and nothing is charged.

curl -s -X POST https://api.agentgates.ai/api/compute/deployments \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"plan":"compute.starter","hours":1,"image":"nginx:alpine"}' |
  jq -r '.accepts[] | "\(.network): \((.maxAmountRequired | tonumber) / 1000000) USDC"'

Each entry of accepts is one network's own offer: the amount in USDC atomic units, the token contract and the address to pay. The plans and their live prices are in GET /api/compute/catalog.

Pay that amount, send the same request again

Sign the amount (an EIP-3009 transfer authorization on Base or Polygon, a transfer on Solana) and resend the same request with the payment attached. The official x402 v2 client does both steps:

import { wrapFetchWithPaymentFromConfig } from '@x402/fetch';
import { ExactEvmScheme } from '@x402/evm';
import { privateKeyToAccount } from 'viem/accounts';

const pay = wrapFetchWithPaymentFromConfig(fetch, {
  schemes: [{ network: 'eip155:8453', client: new ExactEvmScheme(privateKeyToAccount(process.env.EVM_PRIVATE_KEY)) }],
});

const res = await pay('https://api.agentgates.ai/api/compute/deployments', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { 'content-type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify({ plan: 'compute.starter', hours: 1, image: 'nginx:alpine', port: 80 }),
});
console.log(await res.json()); // { deploymentId, status: "provisioning", ... }

Settlement confirms on chain, the machine provisions, and the billed clock starts when it reads running, not at payment. A wallet that cannot cover the amount is refused before anything moves: the answer says how much it needs and how much it holds.

The full example, which prints the price and pays only with --yes, is in the repo.

Why confidential

The machine's memory and disk are encrypted by the processor, and every machine carries a remote-attestation quote with a public proof page, so you can check the hardware before you hand it a secret. Environment values you send are sealed to the machine and never stored.

Keep it running

Watch expiresAt and renew with POST /api/compute/deployments/{id}/renew and {"hours": 1}, paid the same way. Renewals stack on the end of the clock, so an agent can keep a machine alive an hour at a time.

For agents

The contract, written for software: /api/compute/docs
An MCP server with no sign-in that lists plans and prices a machine: https://mcp.agentgates.ai/compute
Skills for coding agents: npx skills add agentgates-ai/agentgates
Every price, read live: agentgates.ai/pricing

DEV Community: Carlos Soto

Let your AI agent place a real phone call, paid per call in USDC

Read the windows, free

Who talks

The 402 is the price

When the agent needs a number of its own

For agents

Rent a confidential VM with USDC in two HTTP requests, no signup

The 402 is the quote

Pay that amount, send the same request again

Why confidential

Keep it running

For agents