Run the action gateway in 5 minutes

The action gateway puts your agents' Stripe refunds under their Burnbound policy. It runs in your account, with your Stripe key: Burnbound never sees it. This guide puts it on Render, Railway, Fly.io or Docker Compose in a few minutes, from the panel's Connect your gateway assistant. How refunds are decided is in Action gateway: Stripe refunds under your agent's policy.

1. Create the gateway in Burnbound

In the dashboard, under Organization → Action gateway, click Create the gateway. Copy its id and its secret (bbgw_…) now: the secret is shown once. If you lose it, rotate it and use the new one.

2. Create a restricted Stripe key

In Stripe, Developers → API keys → Create restricted key, in test mode first (rk_test_…), with only:

A live key (rk_live_…) also needs GATEWAY_ALLOW_LIVE=1, once the gateway works in test mode.

3. Pick a platform

Below the gateway's details, the Connect your gateway assistant shows each platform's variables with your gateway's id already in. Every template pins the image ghcr.io/martinvarelaa/burnbound-action-gateway to a version, never latest, and health-checks /healthz. The two secrets, BURNBOUND_GATEWAY_SECRET and STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, go into the platform's secrets, never into a file.

• Render. Deploy to Render creates the service from the Blueprint and asks once for the gateway id and the two secrets. Use a paid instance: a free one sleeps, and the first refund after it would time out.
• Railway. New → Docker Image with the pinned image, the variables (the secrets as sealed variables) and a domain under Networking. Railway sets PORT and the gateway listens on it.
• Fly.io. From a folder with the fly.toml template: fly launch --copy-config --no-deploy, the id in fly.toml, fly secrets set STRIPE_SECRET_KEY=… BURNBOUND_GATEWAY_SECRET=…, then fly deploy.
• Docker Compose, next to your agents. The assistant shows docker-compose.yml. Write the two secrets to secrets/stripe_secret_key and secrets/burnbound_gateway_secret, put BURNBOUND_GATEWAY_ID=<id> in the Compose environment file next to it (the assistant shows the command), then docker compose up -d. The port is published on the machine's loopback only.

On a platform the gateway is reachable from the internet. It already refuses any request without an agent key of your organization, and the templates open nothing else.

4. Run check

Before the first refund, run the gateway's own test:

node gateway.mjs check

From Render's Shell, railway ssh, fly ssh console -C "node gateway.mjs check" or docker compose run --rm gateway node gateway.mjs check. It checks, in order, that the configuration loads, that Burnbound answers and accepts the gateway's signature, and that the Stripe key can read charges in the mode GATEWAY_ALLOW_LIVE says. It ends with check passed, or with one line per problem and exit code 1. It never prints the Stripe key or the gateway secret, only their last 4 characters.

Once check passes, the dashboard shows the gateway connected, with how long ago it last called Burnbound. More than 24 hours without contact shows a warning: check that the gateway is running and that its secret is current.

5. Point your agents at it

Set BURNBOUND_GATEWAY_URL in the MCP server's environment to the gateway's https:// URL (with Compose on the same machine, http:// with the loopback address and port 8787), and allow Stripe · refund on the agent. The details are in steps 4 and 5 of the refunds guide.

Burnbound itself is set up in the quickstart. The same policy covers the agent's x402 payments to APIs from the catalog.