02 — The Gap

Not a payment gateway. A settlement layer for AI.

Stripe handles payments. OpenAI handles inference. Nobody handles what happens in between — the moment a user's money becomes a developer's margin becomes a provider's revenue.

That's the gap. That's what we built.

Not because it's sexy. It isn't. Billing infrastructure is the most boring, most invisible, and most critical layer in any economy. It was true for banking in 1472. It's true for AI now.

User pays → Developer earns margin → Provider gets paid → Audit trail recorded. All in one atomic operation. All or nothing. That's the protocol.

— Core design principle

02b — What we're not

We're not Stripe. We're not a crypto project. We're not another API wrapper. We don't process payments — we settle AI transactions. Atomically. With four parties. In milliseconds.

03 — Five principles

The rules are simple.

01 Atomic. All or nothing.

User pays, developer earns, provider gets paid, audit logged — all in one operation, or none of it happens. No intermediate states. No "oops." No reconciliation nightmares.

02 Four-party. By design.

User → App → Provider → FinSetAI. Everyone has skin in the game. Everyone sees their part. Not bilateral. Not a middleman. A settlement protocol.

03 Prepaid. Cost cap built in.

User's bank account is never connected to variable AI costs. Wallet runs out → transaction stops. No surprises. No runaway bills. The killer security feature nobody else has.

04 Transparent. Every token tracked.

Hash Ledger records every settlement. Immutable audit trail. Who asked, what model, what it cost, who earned what. EU AI Act compliance by architecture, not by patch.

05 Developer-first. You set the margin.

0–100% markup. Fixed price mode. Your app, your economics. We handle the plumbing — settlement, wallets, audit trail. You handle the product.

03b — How it started

We weren't building a settlement protocol. We were building AI apps for real estate brokers. And we couldn't figure out how to bill users for AI they consumed. Nobody could.

So we built the billing layer first. And realized it was the product.

Nobody in San Francisco was looking for this from the bottom up. Everyone was solving the trillion-dollar problem top-down. McKinsey reports. Armies of analysts. Result? Paralysis. We started with one invoice. And ended with a protocol.