The questions people and agents ask before they build on WAVE.
Twenty-five answers on pricing, payments, keys, SLA tiers, compliance, data residency, and what is live today.
For developers
One key, one API, every capability. What it costs and what is live.
What is WAVE?
WAVE is video infrastructure for the agentic internet: an open protocol and one API for live and on-demand video, built for the people who make it and the agents that pay for it. You integrate once. WAVE moves the video across every transport it speaks, and the route a person calls with a key is the route an agent calls and pays for over HTTP-402.
What can I build with the API today?
Clips, voice, captions, transcription, render, enhance, search, and vision each answer on their own route under api.wave.online/v1 today. Live ingest and delivery run through the same gateway. The full route list is the OpenAPI document at api.wave.online/openapi.json, and each engine page marks every capability live, building, or planned.
How do I get an API key?
Claim a key in the developer portal at dev.wave.online. One key covers every product. Send it as a Bearer token on any route; the gateway enforces authentication, scope, entitlement, and metering on the call.
What does it cost to start?
Build is $49 a month with a $100 monthly usage credit and 10% off every meter rate. Ship is $299 a month with a $350 credit and 20% off. Scale is custom-priced for volume with 30% or more off, dedicated GPU capacity, and a 99.95% SLA. Every plan cancels at any time. An agent pays per request over x402 and needs no plan.
How is usage metered and billed?
Every capability has a published meter, priced per minute, per query, or per decision. At list, a clip is $0.02 per minute, captions $0.025, transcription $0.015, voice $0.30, and render $0.60. Plan credits draw down first. The console shows every metered unit in the ledger, and the same amount appears in the 402 challenge an agent receives on that route.
Which transports does WAVE speak today, and which are on the roadmap?
Fifteen transports are live. Contribution: SRT, RTMP, RTMPS, WHIP, RIST, MPEG-TS, and SDI. Delivery: HLS, LL-HLS, DASH, CMAF, MoQ, WebTransport, WebRTC, and MP4. AES67 and OMT carry audio over IP. NDI, Dante, SMPTE ST 2110, and MXL are on the roadmap and are not shipped adapters.
Do I need an SDK, or can I call HTTP directly?
HTTP is the contract. Every route is documented in OpenAPI at api.wave.online/openapi.json and callable with curl. The @wave-av/sdk package on npm wraps the same routes for people, and @wave-av/mcp-server gives an agent the same capabilities as MCP tools. An agent that speaks x402 needs no package: it reads the 402 and sends the signed payment header.
What is live, and what is still preview?
Every capability carries one of three labels. Live means the route answers in production and returns a price. Building means the code exists and is not yet a public route. Planned means it is on the roadmap. The WAVE Wallet is being built. NDI, Dante, and ST 2110 are planned. Beta and preview features are labeled and sit outside the SLA.
Where do I see uptime and incidents?
wave.online/status probes every public surface on each load and shows the result per surface, with the same data as JSON at wave.online/status.json. P0 and P1 incidents post to the status page within 15 minutes of detection, with updates every 30 minutes until resolved, and a post-incident review follows a P0 within 7 days.
For agent builders
No account, no card, no human in the loop. A 402, a signature, a result.
What happens when an agent calls a route without a key?
The gateway answers HTTP 402 Payment Required. The body lists what it accepts: the scheme, the network, the exact amount in atomic USDC, the address to pay, and a quote token that binds the price to the route. A POST to api.wave.online/v1/clips with no credentials returns a 402 quoting 20000 atomic USDC, which is $0.02, on Base. Pay it, repeat the call with the payment header, and the same route returns the result.
How does an agent pay?
Over x402 with the exact scheme. The agent signs an EIP-3009 TransferWithAuthorization for the quoted amount as EIP-712 typed data and sends it in the X-Payment header. The WAVE facilitator recovers the payer from the signature, settles USDC on Base, and releases the response. MPP is served on the same handler for clients that speak it.
Which network and asset does WAVE settle on?
USDC on Base mainnet for production: chain eip155:8453, contract 0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913. USDC on Base Sepolia for development: chain eip155:84532, contract 0x036CbD53842c5426634e7929541eC2318f3dCF7e. Verify both addresses against your own records before you integrate.
Does WAVE hold my agent's keys?
No. The wallet key stays on the agent. WAVE receives a signed authorization, never a private key, and verification is signature recovery with no gas and no RPC call. USDC itself rejects a reused nonce, so one signature settles once, and that guarantee does not depend on WAVE.
Can I use the WAVE facilitator for my own x402 server?
Yes. Point paymentMiddleware() in x402-hono or agents/x402 at https://gateway.wave.online/v1/x402/facilitator. That is the only change. Your server never holds a private key or talks to an RPC node; WAVE verifies, settles on Base mainnet, and rejects replays. The discovery manifest is at gateway.wave.online/.well-known/x402.
Is there an MCP server?
Yes. The WAVE MCP server runs at api.wave.online/mcp and serves 66 tools over HTTP, from facilitator status and identity resolution to pricing manifests and media capabilities. The descriptor at wave.online/.well-known/mcp points an MCP client at it, and every tool is payable over the same 402 flow as the REST routes.
How does an agent discover what WAVE offers and what it costs?
Three machine-readable documents. gateway.wave.online/.well-known/wave-skills.json lists 178 priced capabilities with route and meter. api.wave.online/openapi.json documents 54 routes. The x402 manifest at gateway.wave.online/.well-known/x402 names the facilitator, the scheme, and the supported networks, and a _x402 DNS TXT record on wave.online points registries at it.
Does an agent need an account?
No. An agent pays per request and needs no account, no card, and no human in the loop. It can present a did:wave credential to carry identity across calls. Every settlement is screened against sanctions lists on the way through, and a person with a bearer key uses the identical route.
What does the Dispatch Engine do, and what does a decision cost?
It classifies a request at the edge and returns a routing decision: which tier runs the work, at what cost, under whose keys. WAVE meters the decision and never the inference; your keys, prompts, and models stay on your infrastructure. A decision at dispatch.wave.online/v1/route quotes 1000 atomic USDC, which is $0.001, over x402. Card billing is available through a plan.
For security reviewers and procurement
The posture in writing, the contracts to sign, the addresses to email.
Is WAVE SOC 2 certified?
WAVE does not hold a SOC 2 attestation. WAVE runs on Cloudflare, Supabase, and Stripe, each of which holds SOC 2 Type II, and the trust center lists every subprocessor with its role and the data it touches.
What is the compliance posture?
GDPR and CCPA aligned, with a signed DPA available. HIPAA-ready under a signed Business Associate Agreement. EU AI Act Article 26 record-keeping with immutable audit records retained for five years. Every commitment is published in full under wave.online/legal.
Where is data stored, and can I pin a region?
Default storage is multi-region on the Cloudflare edge with Supabase and R2 underneath, AES-256 encrypted at rest. Enterprise customers pin all personal data and audit storage to US-only or EU-only regions. Transfers from the EU, EEA, and UK to the US rely on Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
How long do you keep data, and how does deletion work?
VOD recordings keep 30 days by default, configurable per account. Application logs keep 90 days. EU AI Act Article 26 audit records keep five years by mandate. On account deletion, storage objects purge within 7 days, database rows within 30, and backups age out by day 35. Data subject requests go to privacy@wave.online with the subject line DSAR and are answered within 30 days.
What are the SLA tiers?
Three monthly uptime targets. 99.5% for free and trial usage with no service credits. 99.9% for Build and Ship with 10 to 25% prorated credits. 99.95% for Scale with 10 to 50% credits and a 15-minute first response on a P0, 24x7. Credit requests go to billing@wave.online within 30 days of the affected month.
How do I report a security issue?
Email security@wave.online. The disclosure policy is at wave.online/security, and the same contact is published as an RFC 9116 security.txt at trust.wave.online/.well-known/security.txt so a scanner or an agent reads it in one request.
Who is the contracting entity, and who signs the DPA or BAA?
WAVE Online, LLC, Sheridan, Wyoming. The DPA is GDPR Article 28 compliant and is signed before any EU customer data is processed. The BAA covers HIPAA workloads. Write to privacy@wave.online for either document and to hello@wave.online for enterprise terms.
A question this page does not answer
Write to us. One team answers every channel, and your agents can ask the MCP server directly.