Alternatives to Kairos
Kairos: Finic's open-source (Apache-2.0) real-time fraud and risk decisioning platform, an alternative to Sift, Sardine, Riskified and SEON: one call returns approve, step up, review or block for each sign-up, login, order, payment or payout, with a risk score and reasons. Combines Finic's Grayson decision model, which answers plain-language questions like 'Is this email throwaway?', with logistic regression and gradient-boosted trees. An MCP server lets Claude Code, Cursor or Codex build workflows and run model experiments on your data. TypeScript and Python SDKs, a CLI and HTTP API; Kairos Cloud or self-host with Docker. Looking for something different? Here are other tools in Payments.
Stripe
Payments infrastructure: checkout, subscriptions, invoicing and payment links.
Lemon Squeezy
Merchant of record for selling software and digital products, now part of Stripe.
Paddle
Merchant of record payments platform for SaaS businesses.
ForgeMesh Pay-per-Crawl
Open-source (GPLv2) WordPress plugin that answers AI crawlers, SEO crawlers and scripts with HTTP 402 and serves the page once they pay your per-page price in USDC on Base via x402, straight to your wallet. Humans and reverse-DNS-verified search engines read free; bot analytics and a Monitor mode in wp-admin.
Hardcount
Open-source (MIT) self-hosted usage billing for AI products, an alternative to Stripe Billing and Lago: price tokens per model and token type on one meter, sell prepaid credit, add a base fee plus usage on one invoice, and see margin per customer and per model. Hardcount makes the invoices and Stripe charges the card, with failed-payment retries; test clocks preview invoices, and a LiteLLM proxy can send usage events. One Go program with Postgres and Redis; pre-1.0, Stripe and cards only, no SDKs yet.
The 2 biggest AI stories, every morning.
One short email: the two stories that matter, and why.
You're in.
The Daily AI Brief will land in your inbox soon. If you don't see it, check Promotions or Spam and move it to your main inbox.