Inspiration
Teams waste time on small recurring purchases — snacks, supplies, shared tools. I wanted to hand an agent a goal and a budget, not a shopping list, and get a receipt back.
What it does
Agentic Pay takes a goal ("team snacks, $100 budget"), searches and compares options, and pays with PayPal Sandbox only inside the budget. If the total would exceed the budget, it stops and asks a human to approve before any payment.
How I built it
PayPal Developer Platform — Orders API in sandbox; Python + FastAPI backend; a deterministic value-ranking agent (with an optional Gemini hook) for the compare-and-decide step; a single-page web demo. Every payment is a sandbox order/capture, never real money.
Challenges I ran into
Making delegation safe — the hard part is not paying, it is not paying. The budget guard plus explicit human approval on over-budget purchases is the core design, enforced server-side before any payment call.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
An end-to-end loop — goal in, compared options, PayPal sandbox capture, receipt/report out — with the over-budget pause demonstrated.
What I learned
Delegated payments are a policy problem before they are a payments problem: budgets, approval rules, and audit receipts matter as much as the API calls.
What's next for Agentic Pay
Real merchant catalogs, per-category budgets, and team approval policies.
Built With
- fastapi
- gemini-api
- javascript
- paypal-orders-api
- paypal-sandbox
- python
