Manifests, Policy, Receipts

Agent commerce needs more than a payment button.

The payment rail moves money. The surrounding system explains whether the spend should happen, what the buyer is allowed to do, and what proof must come back afterwards.

For Attest, the first practical pattern has three parts.

Manifest

The manifest is how an agent discovers a service. It should answer the questions a human landing page answers, but in a structure an agent can consume quickly:

• what the service does
• who provides it
• what it costs
• what inputs it expects
• what outputs it returns
• what policies apply
• which files or endpoints should be read next

Policy

Policy is the guardrail. It tells an agent what is allowed, blocked, capped, or escalated.

The policy layer is not only for regulated industries. Even a simple data lookup needs clear boundaries: maximum spend, acceptable use, refund posture, and whether the agent can act without further human approval.

Receipt

The receipt is the audit object. It should tell the principal what happened, when it happened, what was charged, whether the action succeeded, and where the evidence lives.

Without receipts, autonomous spend becomes a black box. With receipts, it becomes an operating system.

The Attest Starting Point

Attest already publishes its service index, pricing, policy, legal pages, and agent instructions. The blog will document that pattern openly so other builders can copy the parts that make sense.