Solo dev selling tools to AI agents: 3,700 crawler hits, 1 customer, $0.07 in two weeks
S_B_B_B_K · reddit · 2026-10-15
A solo developer shares honest two-week numbers from selling micro-paid tools to AI agents via x402: 12 tools priced $0.01–$0.25 per call (npm/PyPI malware checks, SEC filing decoders, trading halts, company verification), also exposed as an MCP server and listed in the x402 discovery index.
Results: 3,700 requests from AI crawlers, 1,400 MCP connections that were almost all directory scanners, 50 calls from real agents, and exactly one paying customer—an agent wallet shopping across 20 x402 sellers that day, which bought 5 tools on day one and returned for 2 more. Total outside revenue: about 7 cents.
Key lessons: most "traffic" is bots indexing bots, so you must split crawlers/scanners/real usage or fool yourself; agents shop on price and coverage (the biggest seller has 11,000+ listings at $0.01, so competing on correctness is the only path); feedback beats marketing—a user flagged that "no filings found" is dangerous without reporting the search window, and he shipped the fix same-day. His monitoring stack separates traffic types, logs failed payments, and pushes notifications on new wallets. Next: add RLUSD on XRP Ledger, list in more agent-facing directories, and keep every tool selling at least monthly to survive discovery listings.
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