P402 Router is a routing control plane for x402 payments that sits between paid endpoints and facilitators. It evaluates request context, selects an accept option, routes verify and settle operations, and records a decision trace for each payment attempt.

The product offers smart routing to pick the best path per request while tracking p95 verify and settle latency per facilitator. It provides spend controls to enforce per-buyer budgets, route caps, RPM limits, and deny rules with stable codes. Router also includes Bazaar overlays to expose machine-readable metadata and keep discovery listings current using v2 patterns, plus money analytics to measure conversion from 402 to verified to settled payments.

Router works with the x402 protocol using HTTP 402 with PAYMENT-REQUIRED and PAYMENT-SIGNATURE headers. The system provides a four-step request flow: buyer requests a paid endpoint, server returns 402 with payment requirements, buyer retries with payment signature, and server verifies and settles through facilitators. It includes replay safety with idempotency controls to reduce duplicate settles and noisy retries.

The benefits include enabling pay-per-call APIs to meter every request without subscriptions, charging per tool invocation for MCP servers, gating spend and domains for agent-to-agent interactions, and facilitating internal chargeback for paid edges between services across teams. It provides safe defaults for paid endpoints with role-based access for admin actions, key rotation for Router API keys, least-privilege secrets per environment, and audit logs for policy changes.

The product is built for paid APIs and agent stacks, supporting agentic patterns where traditional APIs were built for people with credit cards while P402 is built for agents with wallets. Target users include developers building self-healing data pipelines and autonomous swap research systems that require autonomous, zero-friction high-fidelity loops.