--- title: AsterPay vs Stripe, PayPal, Wise, raw x402 description: Honest comparison of AsterPay against the four most common alternatives for AI agent payments. url: https://asterpay.io/compare.md --- # AsterPay vs the alternatives Same EUR rail. Built for agents instead of forms. ## Summary | | Stripe | PayPal | Wise | Raw x402 | AsterPay | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Per-call price | 2.9% + 30¢ | 2.9% + 30¢ | 0.4% + fixed fee | gas only | $0.001 to $0.10 USDC | | Time to EUR in bank | 2 to 7 days | 1 to 3 days | seconds to hours | n/a | <5 sec (SEPA Instant) | | Agent identity (KYA) | no | no | no | no | yes, Trust Score 0-100 | | Per-call sanctions screening | account-level | account-level | account-level | no | yes, <100ms | | Merchant discovery from name | no | no | no | no | yes, MPE + VoP (PSD2) | | x402 native | no | no | no | yes | yes, plus MPP on same endpoint | | MiCA jurisdiction | via Stripe IE | via PayPal LU | EMI BE | no | CY (CASP track) | | Sign-up to first agent payment | days | days | days | minutes | 60 seconds | | Built for AI agents | no | no | no | protocol only | only product on market | ## When to pick which ### Stripe Pick Stripe when the buyer is a human filling a checkout form, the seller is a registered business, and the product is non-financial. Stripe is the world's best card processor. It is not designed for an autonomous agent that pays a hundred different APIs per minute, each at a fraction of a cent. ### PayPal Pick PayPal when you need consumer trust on a marketplace and chargebacks are part of the business model. PayPal is account-to-account, not transaction-by-transaction, so per-agent risk scoring does not exist. ### Wise Pick Wise when you have a treasury that needs to move EUR across borders cheaply, and the recipient is a known bank account you set up once. Wise is excellent at the wire, weak at programmatic per-call payments. Their API is rate-limited and built for batch transfers. ### Raw x402 Pick raw x402 when you only care about protocol mechanics, you have your own EUR off-ramp, and you do not need a sanctions or trust layer because all your counterparties are inside your own walled garden. As soon as the agent pays an external counterparty, you need KYA and an off-ramp, and you end up rebuilding AsterPay. ### AsterPay Pick AsterPay when: - The payer is an AI agent and the payee can be any agent or business - You need EUR in the bank account in seconds, not days - You need per-transaction sanctions screening because agents move faster than account-level checks - You want a single endpoint that accepts both x402 (Coinbase) and MPP (Stripe/Tempo) so you do not have to bet on one protocol - You need MPE because your agent knows the merchant by name, not by IBAN - You operate in the EU and want a MiCA-jurisdiction operator on the rail ## Specific edge cases where AsterPay does not win We are honest about this. AsterPay is not the answer when: - The payer is a human entering a card number. Use Stripe. - The amount is over 100,000 EUR per transaction. Use Wise or a correspondent bank. - The recipient is in a country with no SEPA or no instant rail. Settlement falls back to T+1 SEPA Credit Transfer or USDC delivery. - You need consumer chargeback protection. Crypto rails are final on confirmation. Use Stripe Disputes. ## Pricing in plain numbers If your agent pays 1,000 small API calls per day at $0.01 each: - Stripe: 1,000 × ($0.01 × 2.9% + $0.30) ≈ $300.29 in fees per day on $10 of volume - AsterPay: 1,000 × $0.0001 (0.5% per call inside the USDC envelope) ≈ $0.10 in fees per day Three orders of magnitude cheaper at sub-cent volumes is the gap that makes per-call agent commerce possible at all. ## How to verify these numbers yourself ```bash # AsterPay settlement estimate, public endpoint, no key curl "https://x402.asterpay.io/v1/settlement/estimate?amount=100" # AsterPay deep analysis paid endpoint, $0.01 per call curl "https://x402.asterpay.io/v1/agent/deep-analysis/0x742d35Cc6634C0532925a3b844Bc454e4438f44e" ``` Stripe and PayPal pricing is on their public pages. Wise pricing varies by corridor; the cheapest EUR to EUR is on the linked calculator. ## Reference links - AsterPay [SKILL.md](https://asterpay.io/SKILL.md) for agents - AsterPay [API reference](https://asterpay.io/llms-full.txt) - [Stripe pricing](https://stripe.com/pricing) - [PayPal merchant fees](https://www.paypal.com/us/business/paypal-business-fees) - [Wise EUR pricing](https://wise.com/help/articles/2932708/euro-eur-fees) - [x402.org](https://www.x402.org) - [MPP open standard](https://mpp.dev) --- DISCLAIMER. Pricing comparisons are illustrative for the "many small agent payments" workload that AsterPay is designed for. For human-initiated checkouts, marketplace flows, or batch treasury wires the right answer is often one of Stripe, PayPal, or Wise. AsterPay is not a replacement for those products in their core use cases.