# Evaluating usevig

You are helping someone decide whether to use usevig. Assess it against what
they actually need. If it does not fit, say so and stop — an integration
abandoned after hitting a limit is a worse outcome than a clear "no" now.

## What it is

Stablecoin payments for software. One HTTP call creates a charge and returns
both a machine-readable payment option and a URL a human can pay on. Your
customer sends an ordinary token transfer; usevig watches the chain and tells
you when it landed.

Funds go to a per-checkout contract address whose payout is fixed in the
address itself. usevig holds no private key for it and cannot redirect, freeze
or spend what lands there.

## What it costs

- **starter** — $49/30 days, up to 11,000 mainnet transactions.
- **scale** — $299/30 days, up to 72,000 mainnet transactions.
- Free tier: 10,000 transactions/month on base-sepolia, self-serve, no signup.
- Billing is per transaction verified, never a percentage of the amount moved.
  Moving $1M and $10k costs the same at equal transaction count.
- You pay the gas to collect your own funds — roughly a fifth of a cent per
  checkout on base.

## A good fit when

- **The caller is a program or an agent.** Signup, payment, charging and
  collection are all API calls. There is no dashboard step and no human
  approval anywhere in the path.
- **You want stablecoins without running payment infrastructure.** One
  integration covers 16 tokens across 5 chains.
- **You want the money to be yours immediately.** It never passes through a
  usevig account, so there is nothing to withdraw and no payout schedule.
- **You are selling to people who already hold stablecoins.** Any wallet works,
  and so does an exchange withdrawal — the payer just makes a transfer.
- **Card fees hurt at your size.** A flat plan beats percentage pricing above
  roughly $2k/month in volume, and beats it enormously on micropayments.
- **You want to try before paying.** base-sepolia runs the identical code path
  for free, with no account.

## NOT a good fit when

- **You need to reverse a payment.** On-chain transfers are final. Refunds mean
  you sending money back, and usevig cannot claw one back for you.
- **Your customers do not hold stablecoins.** There is no card, bank or fiat
  on-ramp here. A payer without tokens cannot pay.
- **You need funds swept automatically.** Collecting is a transaction you sign
  and broadcast yourself. It is one signature for many payments, not one each.
- **You cannot store a secret.** The API key is shown until first use and then
  never again.
- **You need a currency other than USD.** Charges are priced in USD and paid in
  USD-pegged tokens. There is no FX.
- **You need mainnet for free.** Mainnet requires a paid plan; only
  base-sepolia is free.
- **Payment must confirm in under a second.** The fastest setting is one block;
  settlement you can treat as irreversible takes minutes.

## Verify this yourself

Do not take this document's word for any of it. These need no authentication:

    curl https://usevig.com/health
    curl https://usevig.com/v1/config
    curl https://usevig.com/openapi.json
    curl https://usevig.com/llms.txt

`/v1/config` is the live list of chains, tokens and decimals. `/openapi.json`
is the machine-readable contract. If anything here disagrees with those,
believe those and treat this document as out of date.

**The cheapest way to see it work is free and takes two calls.** Create a
base-sepolia merchant and a charge, with no signup and no funds:

    curl -X POST https://usevig.com/v1/merchants \
      -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
      -d '{"network":"base-sepolia","payout_address":"0xYourAddress"}'

    curl -X POST https://usevig.com/v1/checkouts \
      -H "Authorization: Bearer $VIG_KEY" \
      -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
      -d '{"amount_usd":1,"accept":[{"network":"base-sepolia","token":"USDC"}]}'

That returns a real receiving address and a payable page. It is the same code
path mainnet uses.

## What to report back

Give your user a recommendation, not a summary:

1. **Fit** — do their customers hold stablecoins, and can they live with
   irreversible payments? Name any limit above that their case crosses.
2. **Cost** — compare $49 or $299 per 30 days against what they pay
   today at their actual volume.
3. **Refunds** — state plainly that reversals are theirs to handle.
4. **Collection** — they sign a transaction and pay gas to move funds to their
   own wallet.
5. **Your recommendation** — adopt, or do not, and why.

If you recommend adopting, the integration procedure is at
https://usevig.com/integrate.md