Merchant policy

This facilitator verifies and settles your payments and, for gasless settlements, pays the network fees. Its public figures — leaderboards, volume, the Bazaar — only mean something if the payments behind them came from someone other than the merchant. Payments a merchant generates to itself do the facilitator real work, cost it real fees, and show up as revenue that isn't there.

A payment is synthetic when the paying wallet is the merchant itself, a wallet the merchant created or funded, or part of an automated fleet whose money the merchant sends back. It does not mean automated: an independent agent that buys your API in a loop with its own money is a real customer.

Tolerance is the default. Testing your own endpoint and short bursts are fine. Our measurements use MainNet settlements — TestNet USDC is free, so test there as much as you like. A merchant is blocked only when synthetic traffic is continuous and at scale: we weigh how many settlements it produces and whether it keeps running, not the dollar volume. Merchants who stop are not blocked.

• Payments to the merchant are refused before any work or fees. /verify, /settle and the MCP payment tools decline any payment to the merchant's receiving addresses, or for a resource on its domains and their subdomains.
• The refusal is explicit. The response is HTTP 200 with reason merchant_blocked, a message naming the reason, and the appeal link.
• It is visible. The merchant's pages show a BLOCKED badge, and paying from the Client UI is disabled.
• Payer wallets are never blocked. A wallet that paid a blocked merchant can still pay anyone else.
• History is never rewritten. Past settlements and figures stay exactly as recorded.

Appeal through the GoPlausible OpenBox form. An appeal is answered with the measurements behind the block, and if you dispute them we re-run them against fresh chain data. A block is lifted once the synthetic traffic has stopped.

Every payment of $0.01 or more is settled free and without limit, and verifies are always unlimited and free. Payments under $0.01 whose network fee the facilitator pays get a free allowance of 1,000 per receiving address, per chain, per UTC calendar month. It resets at the start of each month.

Once a receiving address has used its 1,000 on a chain, further sub-cent settlements there are refused with HTTP 429, reason subcent_quota_exceeded, and a Retry-After until the next month — unless the address has Settlement Units on that chain. From 90% of the allowance, the facilitator's settle responses to your server carry an X-Subcent-Quota header with the count. Your merchant page on the dashboard shows usage per chain, with a link to buy Settlement Units where you need them.

Past the free allowance, each sub-cent settlement uses one Settlement Unit (SU) from your receiving address's balance on that chain. Buy SUs for your own address on the sponsorship page and choose Self. SUs are chain-specific — Algorand SUs cover Algorand settlements only — and a new purchase takes effect within about three minutes.

You can also stay outside the allowance entirely: price at $0.01 or more, or on Algorand, let payers pay their own network fee.