Hello everyone! 
I’m currently participating in a hackathon, and my team and I have been thinking a lot about one of the biggest challenges in the Fediverse: sustainability.
We all know that running a PeerTube instance isn’t cheap. Instance administrators bear the infrastructure costs, while creators often struggle to monetize their work without relying on privacy-invasive advertising or locking content behind expensive and inflexible monthly subscriptions.
To explore a possible solution, we built Tessera, a small sidecar engine along with a companion plugin for self-hosted platforms, including PeerTube.
What does it do?
Instead of subscriptions, it introduces true per-second micropayments.
If a viewer watches 10 seconds of a video, they pay exactly for those 10 seconds (for example, $0.001 USDC). If they close the tab, billing stops instantly.
For example, a creator sets the price they want to charge for a video. That price is then distributed on a per-second basis, and viewers are charged only for the time they actually watch.
From the generated revenue, 90% would go to the creator and 10% to the instance administrator to help cover hosting and operational costs.
These percentages are not final and are only ideas we are currently exploring.
We are also experimenting with different access models:
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A fully locked video that becomes available only once payment starts.
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A tipping model, where videos remain freely accessible and viewers can voluntarily support creators.
We achieve this without gas fees by using off-chain signatures and Circle’s CCTP. The PeerTube plugin simply acts as a reporter, sending viewer_joined and viewer_left webhooks to our sidecar, which handles paywall logic and payment calculations.
We’re still in a very early experimental phase, but the plugin is already functional, and we’re excited about its potential to help instance administrators cover server costs while giving creators a fair way to monetize their content.
Since we’re building this for the ecosystem, your feedback would be incredibly valuable.
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Would a pay-per-second model be useful for your instance?
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Are there any potential issues or concerns we should be thinking about?
You can take a look at our repository here: GitHub - JaDi03/tessera: Per-second streaming payments for self-hosted platforms, powered by Circle x402 and Arc Testnet. · GitHub
Plugin: GitHub - JaDi03/peertube-plugin-tessera · GitHub
We’ll soon publish a complete integration guide, along with all the documentation needed to deploy it on your own instances.
All feedback is welcome and will help us improve the concept.
P.S. If you like the idea, a 
on GitHub would be a huge encouragement and would let us know we’re moving in the right direction and building something the community finds valuable.