Building Metered Streams with MPP and Fastly Compute

Stripe and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) extends HTTP 402-based machine payments from single paid requests to streaming and usage-based services, allowing payment authorization to remain connected to delivery over time. An experimental Fastly Compute demo compares a Stripe Shared Payment Token flow, which uses `intent=charge` to preauthorize a fixed $0.50 budget before a ten-unit stream begins, with a Tempo flow using `intent=session`, where a payment channel’s cumulative authorization increases as each unit is consumed. Both approaches provide similar browser-visible streaming events, but Stripe meters delivery within one preauthorized PaymentIntent while Tempo natively associates payment with incremental consumption and settles when the session closes. The Tempo implementation uses Fastly Fanout to retain a long-lived browser connection while Compute processes bounded payment and delivery requests, with KV Store preserving session state. Potential applications include AI output, premium data feeds, licensed crawling, and multi-step processing services, although the demo is not production-ready and would require secure secret storage, atomic state management, replay protection, spending controls, rate limits, observability, idempotency, and policies for interrupted streams or unused funds.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.