WordPress Plugin · Paid by card or USDC · Vendor-neutral
Encrypt your content.
Premium posts are encrypted in the page. A reader pays by card on your own Stripe account, an AI agent pays in USDC to your own wallet, and only then is the key released. CrawlerToll takes no cut and never touches the money.
Why the next paywall is not a wall at all
For twenty years publishers have asked the visitor who they are and hoped for an honest answer. Crawlers lied, caches leaked, and the article was always right there in the HTML for anyone who cared to look. The fix is not a better question. It is
Shipped and running
How the lock works
From the moment you seal a post, its body is not on the page in the clear, for anyone, until a payment made directly to you releases the key.
Step 1
Seal
Mark a post premium and place the cut. The body is stored on the page as AES-256-GCM ciphertext. Caches, feeds, the REST API and scrapers that pretend to be people all get the preview and an encrypted blob.
Step 2
Offer
Readers see a price and pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay on your own Stripe account. AI agents get a signed HTTP 402 offer with x402 headers and pay in USDC to your wallet.
Step 3
Settle
The key is released only against a settled payment, and a payment can't be used for a different purchase. If an unlock is interrupted, the same buyer can finish it with the same payment within 24 hours, while any pass it bought is still live; anything else is refused.
The standards everyone's already adopting.
The AI-crawler-monetization space consolidated around four standards in 2025–2026. CrawlerToll uses three of them: RSL-style licence lines, HTTP 402 and x402. It doesn't verify Web Bot Auth signatures; it recognises declared AI crawlers by their user agent.
RSL (licence lines)
Dec 2025RSL Technical Steering Committee
Really Simple Licensing — robots.txt vocabulary for AI-licensing terms. Backed by Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., Medium, Quora, O'Reilly, Stack Overflow, and Cloudflare.
Web Bot Auth
Mar 2026IETF (draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture-05)
HTTP Message Signatures over Ed25519 keys served from /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. Implemented by Cloudflare, AWS WAF, OpenAI, and Google.
HTTP 402
Q1 2026Cloudflare pay-per-crawl + x402
Payment Required response shape — Cloudflare ships >1 billion HTTP 402s per day. Structured Crawler-Price / Crawler-Price-Rail / Link headers.
x402
Apr 2026x402 Foundation (Linux Foundation)
Coinbase + LF agent-payment rail. Founding members include Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Cloudflare, Circle.
Sixty seconds to set up.
Install the plugin, review the default policy and save. Enforcement is live from then on.
CrawlerToll is not on WordPress.org yet. The listing opens on launch day, and these steps work from then. Questions before that: [email protected].
On ordinary pages AI crawlers are shown this price, or told the content isn't licensed until you can be paid. Paid access is sold per sealed article.
# WordPress admin → Plugins → Add New → search "CrawlerToll"
# Install + activate.
# Settings → CrawlerToll → review the default policy and save.
#
# Or via WP-CLI:
wp plugin install crawlertoll --activateInstall the plugin, or build an agent.
Publishers use the WordPress plugin. Developers of AI agents pay for and read a sealed article over plain HTTP.
Free with both payment rails, a traffic view of who is really at the door, a realised-revenue ledger and a refund workflow that never touches your money. Pro adds access tiers, bundles, metered free articles, webhooks and the full dashboard. Readers can carry an unlock to another device with a QR code.
WordPress plugin
30-crawler catalogue, RSL-style licence lines in robots.txt, sealed paywall with card + USDC rails, Pro revenue tooling. PHP 7.4+.
Install guide →For AI agents
Pay for one sealed article with a signed USDC payment on Base and read it, over plain HTTP in any language. The guide has a complete Node script that checks the signed offer and stays within a spending cap you set.
Agent guide →Vendor-neutral by design.
CrawlerToll doesn't try to be a marketplace, a payment processor or a vocabulary author. It seals your content, tells AI crawlers your terms, and lets readers and agents pay you directly: by card on your own Stripe account, or in USDC to your own wallet. Charthouse never touches your money.
Little data, none of it your articles.
Article text never leaves your server in the clear, card details go only to Stripe, and we hold no payment credentials. The unlock service keeps content keys, prices and unlock receipts, nothing more.
Read exactly what we store →A Charthouse release
Seal your first article.
CrawlerToll is built and run by Charthouse Ltd in London: a WordPress plugin, a hosted unlock service, and a guide for AI agents to pay over plain HTTP.
Start in 60 seconds →