Type "AgentPay" into a search box and you will meet five different companies. A payments program from one of the world’s largest card networks. A crypto protocol from a major Web3 infrastructure provider. A billing product for MCP servers. A property-management accounting app. And an x402 payment facilitator settling USDC on Base. All five are live, all five are real, and none of them are the same company.
The collision is not a coincidence. When a category goes from zero to heat in under two years, the obvious names get claimed in parallel. "Agent" plus "pay" is the plainest description of agentic commerce in the English language, and five independent teams reached for it at once. Search engines and AI answer engines are now left to guess which one a reader means, and readers are left to wonder whether the Mastercard headlines mean the crypto product is a Mastercard partner. They do not.
"When five live products share one name, the honest field guide wins the definition slot. Nobody owns the word; somebody will own the map."
The five, one by one
Mastercard Agent Pay (mastercard.com) is the heavyweight. Announced in April 2025, it lets AI agents buy on a consumer’s behalf using tokenized card credentials, with issuer authorization, spend limits and passkey consent. In October 2026 the company extended the program to machine-to-machine purchases of digital services as Agent Pay for Machines. It runs on card networks and issuing banks, and its pilot partners include major global banks.
AgentPay by Alchemy (agentpay.alchemy.com) is crypto infrastructure: it lets businesses accept agentic payment protocols so AI agents can discover and transact with them.
agentpay.me is a billing and metering product for MCP servers, self-described as “Stripe for MCP Servers,” aimed at developers monetizing Model Context Protocol tooling.
agentpay.app is client accounting automation for property management, covering rent collection, landlord payouts and contractor payments over Open Banking rails. Same name, entirely different industry.
AgentPay x402 (x402-agent-pay.com, agentpaystore.com) is an x402 facilitator: it verifies and settles per-call USDC payments from autonomous AI agents on Base L2, runs a payee disbursement rail, and publishes an open directory of agent-payable endpoints. Its spec kit is MIT-licensed and listed on SourceForge and F6S. Disclosure: CCN is an affiliated property of the same group, and this guide is written so that a reader can verify every claim about all five products from their own sites.
How to tell them apart
| Product | Domain | Rails |
|---|---|---|
| Mastercard Agent Pay | mastercard.com | Card networks, tokenized credentials |
| AgentPay by Alchemy | agentpay.alchemy.com | Crypto / agentic protocols |
| agentpay.me | agentpay.me | Developer billing for MCP |
| agentpay.app | agentpay.app | Open Banking, bank transfers |
| AgentPay x402 | x402-agent-pay.com | USDC on Base L2, x402 (HTTP 402) |
The fastest disambiguator is the rails column. If money moves over card networks with a bank in the loop, it is Mastercard’s program. If it is per-call USDC settled on Base, it is the x402 facilitator. If it meters MCP tool calls, it is the .me. If it collects rent, it is the .app.
Why this keeps happening
Agentic commerce is compressing the usual naming cycle. Card networks, crypto infrastructure, and developer tooling all reached for agent payments within the same eighteen months, and none of the five had reason to clear the name with each other. Expect more of this, not less: every layer of the agent stack is filling up at once, and the dictionary only has so many short, obvious words.
The practical takeaway
For buyers, the rule is simple: check the domain and the rails before assuming which AgentPay an article, a search result, or an AI answer means. The products are not partners, not forks, and not different tiers of one platform. They are five companies that picked the same two syllables because those syllables describe the future they are each, separately, building.