---
title: "Tanso Agent Monetization — open-source billing for agent customers"
description: "Open-source billing, credits, entitlements, scoped access, and payments for products AI agents use. AGPL-3.0 and self-hosted."
date: 2026-09-05
---

# Let agents pay for what they use.

Tanso Agent Monetization is the open-source billing engine for products agents
use. It combines machine-readable pricing, programmatic signup, scoped keys,
spend controls, credits, entitlements, and payments with a ledger that records
usage, customer revenue, and cost to serve.

AGPL-3.0 · self-hosted · Stripe optional · no per-event fee

## Run it locally

```sh
git clone https://github.com/tansohq/tanso-oss.git
cd tanso-oss/deploy
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d --build
./setup.sh
```

- [Source](https://github.com/tansohq/tanso-oss)
- [Quickstart](https://tanso.mintlify.app/quickstart)

## Agent payments and access

- Public machine-readable plans, features, and credit weights
- Programmatic signup with a customer-scoped key
- Deny-by-default credentials pinned to one customer
- Off-session payments and a pollable checkout handoff
- Per-key budgets and spend caps
- Usage and credit-depletion forecasts

## The billing engine

- Idempotent usage events with provider cost attached
- Real-time entitlements and hard credit limits
- Credits with grants, expiry, rollover, and FIFO draw-down
- Plans, subscriptions, proration, invoices, and optional Stripe sync
- Margin by customer, feature, and model

## MCP

Each Tanso instance can expose an MCP server. It is off by default. Actions
that spend money require explicit confirmation, and the same key scopes and
budgets apply as the REST API.

[MCP setup and tool catalog](https://tanso.mintlify.app/mcp)

Agent Monetization is a secondary capability of Tanso. The primary product is
[Agent Readiness](https://tansohq.com/), which evaluates whether an agent can
complete the customer journey end to end.