What an AI agent can buy through Vaaya today, and what it cannot

An agent can buy, through Vaaya, anything that is a metered API in the network, priced per call, and delivered as a response. It cannot buy anything at a merchant's checkout. That is the whole boundary, and the rest of this post is the two lists, the reason the line is where it is, and how an agent finds out for itself which side of it a purchase falls on.

What it can buy

The network is organized into seven pillars. Every provider in it is metered, priced before the call runs, paid by Vaaya on the agent's behalf, and billed to the account only if the call succeeds.

1. Search and research. Exa, Parallel, Tavily, Perplexity, Linkup, Valyu, Brave Search. Live web search, semantic search, deep research runs, priced per query.

2. Scraping. Firecrawl, Apify, Bright Data, Scrape.do, Jina, Diffbot, ScrapingAnt. Page extraction, site crawls, structured data from pages, priced per page or per run.

3. People and company data. Apollo, ContactOut, Tomba, Icypeas, Nyne, Prospeo, TheirStack, OpenFunnel. Contact enrichment, email discovery, hiring signals, priced per record.

4. Public records. SEC EDGAR, CourtListener, Federal Register, USPTO, OpenAlex, GDELT, Wikipedia, Wikidata, the Wayback Machine. Filings, cases, patents, papers, events.

5. Compute. Modal, E2B, Daytona, Runloop, Fly.io. Sandboxes and functions, metered by the second.

6. Media. fal, ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Ideogram, VEED. Image, video, voice, and transcription, priced per generation or per minute.

7. Memory and models. Mem0, Letta, Zep for agent memory. The LLM router for over three hundred models, billed per token.

The agent does not need this list. It calls consult with what it is trying to do, and gets back the providers that can do it and what each costs. The list is here for the human reading over the agent's shoulder.

What it cannot buy

Nothing at a merchant checkout. Concretely, and because these are the questions that get asked:

• Groceries, flights, hotels, tickets, physical goods. These are purchases from a merchant, settled on a card network or through a checkout protocol such as OpenAI and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol or Google's Agent Payments Protocol. Vaaya is not a card and does not speak those protocols. A virtual card issued to the agent, kept out of its context and used for that one class of purchase, is the right tool.

• Subscriptions. Vaaya does not buy a monthly plan from anyone. It pays per call. For almost everything an agent would want a subscription for, the per-call equivalent is in the network, and for an agent's usage pattern, bursts of many small calls rather than steady consumption, per-call is the cheaper shape.

• Software licences and SaaS seats. Same reason. A licence is a merchant purchase, not a metered call.

• Payments to people. Vaaya does not move money between accounts, does not pay contractors, and does not settle agent-to-agent transfers. It pays providers in the network for work delivered.

• Anything with its own vendor account. If a provider is not in the network, the agent cannot pay it through Vaaya. The network is the boundary. It grows every week, and providers can apply to join, but a provider outside it is outside it.

Why the line is there

Vaaya pays providers inside its network on machine rails, x402 in USDC on Base, Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol, or Tempo, behind a policy the account holder set. That design is what makes a two-cent search economic, what lets the per-call ceiling be enforced before any money moves, and what lets a failed call cost nothing. None of those properties survive contact with a merchant checkout. A card network charges a fixed fee that makes small purchases uneconomic; a merchant charges and disputes later, so a refusal before the purchase is impossible; and a checkout page is not an API with a registered price, so there is nothing to compare a ceiling against.

So the boundary is not a limitation we intend to grow out of by adding a card. It is the line between two kinds of purchase that need two kinds of instrument. Metered work wants a policy. Merchant checkout wants a card. Vaaya is the first. Teams that need both keep a virtual card for the second, well away from the agent's context, and let the agent do the ninety-five percent of its spending that is API calls through a policy it cannot exceed.

How the agent finds out

It does not need to read this post. When an agent asks consult for something the network cannot provide, the plan comes back with nothing to execute and says so, and the agent moves on. When it asks for something the network can provide, the plan comes back with prices. The catalog the agent reads is the same one at vaaya.ai/network, and it is the authoritative version of the first list above.

npx @vaaya/mcp install

Questions

What can an AI agent buy through Vaaya?

Metered API calls from providers in the network: web search and research, scraping, people and company data, public records, compute sandboxes, media generation, memory, and models through the LLM router. Each call is priced before it runs and billed only on success.

Can an AI agent buy groceries through Vaaya?

No. Groceries, flights, tickets, and anything else bought at a merchant's checkout need a card or a checkout protocol such as ACP or AP2. Vaaya does not issue cards or pay merchants outside its network.

Can my agent buy a subscription through Vaaya?

No. Vaaya pays providers per call, on success, for metered work. It does not buy subscriptions or software licences. Most of what an agent needs from a subscription is available as a per-call equivalent in the network, which is usually cheaper for an agent's usage pattern.