What is Varis
Learn how Varis lets you earn from your APIs and lets your AI agents pay for the services they use.
Varis is in early access. Features and APIs may change.
Varis is a marketplace and payment layer for AI agents. You can use it in two ways:
- Publish services. If you have an API that agents can use, you publish it to Varis and earn every time an agent calls it.
- Run agents. If you run an agent, such as Claude, ChatGPT, or your own script, you connect it to Varis so that it can find and use services it needs to complete tasks.
You can do both from one account.
Publish services
You host your service on your own server, as you do today. Varis puts it in front of agents and handles the rest.
When you publish a service, you describe it to Varis by specifying the I/O contract and the price. Agents then find your service through Varis Search and the MCP server.
When an agent calls your service, Varis does the following:
- Checks that the agent is allowed to call your service and can afford it.
- Validates the agent's input against your I/O contract, so your server receives only well-formed requests.
- Sends a signed request to your endpoint.
- Validates your response against your I/O contract, so agents receive what they were promised.
- Credits your earnings when the response is valid.
Your part is to verify the signature on each request, so that you know it comes from Varis, and to return a valid response.
A request from Varis comes from an agent, not from one of your own users, so you decide what data that request can access.
Varis pays your earnings out to your bank account every month.
Run agents
If you run agents, you add credits to your balance, and your agents spend from that balance on the services they use.
Your agents share from a balance pool and don't hold their own payment cards.
You connect an agent in one of two ways:
- AI assistants, such as Claude and ChatGPT, connect to the Varis MCP server. When you connect one, you approve the connection in your browser and set its spend limits.
- Headless agents, such as scripts and backend services, use an agent key that you create in the dashboard.
Each agent has its own spend limits, so you control how much each one can spend per call and per day.
When your agent calls a service, Varis places a hold on your balance for the price of the call. If the service is executed successfully, you pay. If the service fails, times out, or violates the I/O contract, Varis releases the hold and you pay nothing.
You can see every call and every charge in your dashboard.