satgate

Your GPU is burning money. Make it earn money.

satgate sits in front of Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp — any OpenAI-compatible backend — and turns it into a pay-per-token API. No accounts. No API keys. No Stripe. Clients pay per token, you earn sats before the response finishes streaming.

Quick start

npx satgate --upstream http://localhost:11434

That's it. satgate auto-detects your models, starts accepting payments, and proxies inference requests. Clients pay per token, you earn sats.

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Try it live

A public instance is running at satgate.trotters.dev. Open it in a browser for the chat playground, or use curl:

# 250 sats of free usage per day per IP — after that you'll get a 402 + invoice
curl -s -w '\n%{http_code}\n' https://satgate.trotters.dev/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"qwen3:0.6b","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"What is Bitcoin?"}]}'

# Check pricing
curl -s https://satgate.trotters.dev/.well-known/l402 | jq .

# Machine-readable description
curl -s https://satgate.trotters.dev/llms.txt

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The old way vs satgate

	The old way	With satgate
Sell GPU time	Sign up for a marketplace (OpenRouter, Together). They set the price, take a cut, own the customer.	npx satgate --upstream http://localhost:11434. You set the price. You keep 100%.
Handle billing	Stripe account, KYC, usage tracking, invoices, chargebacks	Payments settle before the response finishes streaming. No accounts, no disputes.
Serve AI agents	OAuth flows, API key management, billing portals — none of which machines can use	Agents discover your endpoint, pay per token from their own wallet, no human in the loop.
Price fairly	Flat rate per request, regardless of whether it's 10 tokens or 10,000	Actual tokens counted from the response. Overpayments credited back.

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Built for machines

satgate doesn't just serve humans with curl. It's designed for AI agents that pay for their own resources.

Every satgate instance exposes three discovery endpoints — no auth required:

Endpoint	Who reads it
/.well-known/l402	Machines — pricing, models, payment methods as structured JSON
/llms.txt	AI agents — plain-text description of what you're selling
/openapi.json	Code generators — full OpenAPI spec

Pair with 402-mcp and an AI agent can autonomously discover your endpoint, check your prices, pay from its own wallet, and start prompting — no human involved.

sequenceDiagram
    participant A as AI Agent
    participant M as 402-mcp
    participant T as satgate
    participant G as Your GPU

    A->>M: "Use this inference endpoint"
    M->>T: GET /.well-known/l402
    T-->>M: Pricing, models, payment methods
    M->>T: POST /v1/chat/completions
    T-->>M: 402 + Lightning invoice
    M->>M: Pay invoice from wallet
    M->>T: Retry with L402 credential
    T->>G: Proxy request
    G-->>T: Stream response
    T-->>M: Stream completion
    M-->>A: Response

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The secret

Everything you just saw — the payment gating, the multi-rail support, the credit system, the free tier, the macaroon credentials — that's not satgate. That's toll-booth.

satgate is ~400 lines of glue on top of toll-booth. It adds the AI-specific bits: token counting, model pricing, streaming reconciliation, capacity management. Everything else comes from the middleware.

You could build your own satgate for your domain in an afternoon.

Monetise a routing API. Gate a translation service. Sell weather data per request. toll-booth handles the payments — you just write the product logic.

→ See toll-booth

graph TB
    subgraph "satgate (~400 lines)"
        TC[Token counting]
        MP[Model pricing]
        SR[Streaming reconciliation]
        CM[Capacity management]
        AD[Agent discovery]
    end
    subgraph "toll-booth"
        L402[L402 protocol]
        CR[Credit system]
        FT[Free tier]
        PR[Payment rails]
        MA[Macaroon auth]
    end
    TC --> L402
    MP --> CR
    SR --> CR
    CM --> L402
    AD --> L402

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What satgate adds

• Pay-per-token — actual token count from the response, not estimated. Streaming and buffered.
• Model-specific pricing — 1 sat/1k for Llama, 5 sats/1k for DeepSeek. You set the rates.
• Streaming reconciliation — estimated charge upfront, reconciled to actual usage after. Overpayments credited back.
• Capacity management — limit concurrent inference requests to protect your GPU.
• Auto-detect models — queries your upstream on startup. No manual model list.
• Four payment rails — Lightning, Cashu ecash, NWC, and x402 stablecoins. Operator picks what to accept.
• Privacy by design — no personal data collected or stored. No accounts, no cookies, no IP logging. GDPR-safe out of the box.
• Instant public URL — auto-spawns a Cloudflare tunnel. Your GPU is reachable from the internet in seconds.

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How it works

sequenceDiagram
    participant C as Client
    participant T as satgate
    participant G as Your GPU

    C->>T: POST /v1/chat/completions
    T-->>C: 402 + Lightning invoice (estimated cost)
    C->>C: Pay invoice
    C->>T: Retry with L402 credential
    T->>G: Proxy request
    G-->>T: Stream response
    T->>T: Count actual tokens
    T-->>C: Stream completion
    T->>T: Reconcile: credit back overpayment

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Charges are estimated upfront based on model pricing, then reconciled to actual token usage after the response completes. Operators are never short-changed — costs round up. Overpayments are credited to the client's balance for the next request.

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Configuration

Zero config works (just --upstream). For production, create satgate.yaml:

upstream: http://localhost:11434
port: 3000
pricing:
  default: 1          # 1 sat per 1k tokens
  models:
    llama3: 1
    deepseek-r1: 5
freeTier:
  creditsPerDay: 250
capacity:
  maxConcurrent: 4

CLI flags > environment variables > config file > defaults.

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Examples

The examples/ directory contains runnable scripts and config templates:

• basic.sh — start satgate in front of Ollama
• client.sh — discovery and inference requests against a running instance
• production.yaml — production config template with SQLite, per-model pricing, volume tiers
• caddy-reverse-proxy.Caddyfile — Caddyfile for TLS termination

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Get started

# Monetise your local Ollama
npx satgate --upstream http://localhost:11434

# Or point at any OpenAI-compatible backend
npx satgate --upstream http://your-vllm-server:8000

→ toll-booth — the middleware that powers all of this. Build your own. → 402-mcp — give AI agents a wallet. Let them pay for your GPU.

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Built by @TheCryptoDonkey.

• Lightning tips: thedonkey@strike.me
• Nostr: npub1mgvlrnf5hm9yf0n5mf9nqmvarhvxkc6remu5ec3vf8r0txqkuk7su0e7q2

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MIT