Architecture of a Micro-Payment System for Thin-Client Web Applications

Some web-based services need to be charged for on a per-use basis, where each usage may be many thousands or even millions per day. Micro-payment is an approach to charging for web content (typically) for situations with a small cost-per-use/high use-frequency. We describe a prototype architecture for a new micro-payment model, called NetPay. We present an object-oriented design and describe a prototype implementation of NetPay for an on-line newspaper. We report on initial evaluation results deploying our NetPay prototype and outline directions for future research in micro-payment implementations