Agents that pay
their own way

Open tools for an economy where your AI agent holds its own keys, pays its own way in bitcoin, and answers to no platform.

01The idea

Sovereignty isn't granted. It's compiled.

Every online service wants the same things before it does anything for you: an email, a credit card, an API key, an account it can freeze. That's a dead end for the software people are now building — an autonomous AI agent can't fill in a signup form, and handing it your master password is a liability you can't control.

So we build the other thing: rails where software pays per use, in bitcoin, with no account. The agent holds a small wallet with a spending limit, pays a few satoshis for exactly what it needs, and nobody in the middle can surveil it, meter it, or shut it off. Your keys stay yours. The money moves without permission. It runs on hardware you control.

02What we build

A kit of small, open-source (MIT) tools. Free to take, fork, and run — the code is never the product.

A wallet for AI agents

Gives an agent its own Lightning wallet with hard spending caps — so it can pay for things, but never overspend.

A pay-per-use gate

Put any tool or service behind a small bitcoin price. No accounts, no API keys — the user pays an invoice and the tool runs.

No-KYC web search live

A search service an agent can pay for by the query — no signup, no surveillance, self-hosted all the way down.

Native Nostr search live

Search Nostr's own content, paid by the query from inside any Nostr app — no account. Runs as a "data vending machine," listed in Nostr's public service marketplace.

The agent that runs it

A local-first AI agent that ties it together: it earns, spends, and pays for its own tools, under limits it can't exceed.

03It already works

This isn't a pitch deck. The loop runs today, on real money:

Our agent needed a web search. It received an invoice for 50 satoshis (a few cents), paid it from its own wallet over the Lightning Network, and got results — in about four seconds, with no account created at any point, and the payment verified on our own node at both ends.
A stranger zapped one of our posts 2,100 satoshis from their own wallet and instantly received the product by private message — no signup, no platform, payment confirmed on our node, not a middleman's word.

Both are running infrastructure, not slides — built in the open, with the receipts public.

04Where it goes

Software is starting to act on its own — buying data, search, and compute without a human clicking "subscribe." That future needs a payment rail that doesn't require an identity, a bank, or a company's permission. The big players are circling it; almost no one is building the open, no-KYC, you-hold-the-keys version.

We're building it early, on purpose — so that when the agent economy arrives, the sovereign option already exists and belongs to the people running the nodes, not to a handful of platforms.

05Engage