Your agents: Observe / Control
External agents: Admit (Charge policy)
Admit on satgate.io = the Charge policy here. Approved external agents are admitted under a charge policy: verified, priced and paid before protected work runs. These are two lanes, not a three-stage progression.
Every SatGate route uses one lane. Your agents use Observe or Control. External agents use Admit, configured here as the Charge policy.
👁 Observe
Log every request. Block nothing. See the true cost of your agent traffic.
- • Real-time MCP Monitor shows sessions, tool calls, costs
- • MCP Reports and Usage Analytics show cost by tool and by agent
- • Zero impact on agents — they don't know SatGate is there
- • Free tier
Use case: "We just deployed 50 AI agents. What are they actually doing?"
🎚 Control
Set budgets. Get alerts. Block when budgets run out.
- • Per-agent credit budgets via token delegation
- • Per-tool cost attribution via cost profiles
- • When a budget runs out: HTTP routes answer HTTP 402. A paid MCP tool call gets JSON-RPC error -32000: "Budget exhausted" when nothing is left, or "Insufficient budget" when the call costs more than what is left.
Use case: "Engineering gets 10,000 credits/month. No agent should exceed 1,000."
⚡ Admit (Charge policy)
Admit paid external agents. Each request is admitted under a charge policy: verified, priced, and paid before it executes.
- • Configured as policy: charge
- • L402 — Lightning Network micropayments (pay-per-call)
- • x402 — USDC on Base, if the route owner turns it on. One payment buys one request.
- • Fiat402 — Enterprise credit/billing system
- • Receipts record the paid-rail context for the request
Use case: "We expose a proprietary data API. External agents pay $0.01 per call."
Where to go next
Pick the lane you need. Do not treat Admit as the third stage after Control.
These playbooks live in the authenticated cloud dashboard. If you aren't signed in yet, SatGate will send you through login and preserve the destination.
Your agents: Observe / Control. HTTP setup protects an API. In setup you pick whether SatGate only watches the traffic, enforces limits, or asks for payment. Delegation & budgets enforces budgets. Control is not a step toward Admit.
External agents: Admit (Charge policy). Admit paid external agents — Charge policy playbook. Approved external agents are admitted under a charge policy.
For detailed configuration options, see the Enforcement Modes guide.