AI Can Now Pay on Its Own: Apify Makes Thousands of Tools Available to AI Agents

Apify is adding over 20,000 tools to the x402 standard, 10x more than agents could pay for and run before, no account or API key needed.

AI agents are getting their own wallet. With Coinbase’s x402 standard, they gain financial independence and can pay for digital services themselves, without a human having to open an account, enter a credit card, or create an API key. As the first provider with a community marketplace model inside this new payment standard, Apify dramatically expands the emerging ecosystem. Apify is adding more than 20,000 tools from its marketplace to the 2,000 currently available, ready for agents to use on demand.

The x402 payment standard developed by Coinbase, an open-source project now hosted by the Linux Foundation, lets AI agents autonomously discover, pay for, and activate thousands of specialized tools. Transactions run through crypto wallet authorization on Base or another blockchain, with no registration, no card details, and no API keys. The entire process happens with no human involvement. For users of AI applications, Apify’s x402 integration opens a path to giving their agents immediate access to live web data and automation features exactly as needed, paying only for the resources actually used.

“AI agents can handle ever longer and more complex tasks without human help. To advance their autonomy, at some point we will have to give agents money too, so they can obtain data or call external services to get their work done efficiently. Cryptocurrencies look like the ideal tool for this. They are decentralized, not controlled by any single company, payments carry low transaction fees, and they cannot be reversed. Coinbase’s x402 is currently the most advanced of all agentic payment protocols, so integrating it into Apify was an obvious choice,” says Jan Curn, co-founder and CEO of Apify.

How x402 payments work
x402 uses the special HTTP status code “402 Payment Required.” It has been part of the web’s specification since the very beginning and has sat almost entirely unused for decades. That is now changing with the rising role of AI agents.

The system works by having the agent send a request to a chosen tool via API. The server responds with the price to run it, the agent’s wallet then approves payment in the USDC stablecoin on the Base network, and the tool runs immediately. The whole exchange happens within a request or two, fully automatically and with no human involved.

Thanks to low transaction fees, services can charge agents per individual Apify Actor run. For $1 in USDC, an agent gets roughly 350 company records from Google Maps, 430 profiles from Instagram, 380 products from Amazon, or 110 trending videos from TikTok. The agent decides on its own which tool to use and how much to pay for it, then runs it right away.

“The HTTP 402 Payment Required status code waited in the web’s standards for decades. Its moment has arrived, with AI agents,” says Curn.

10x more tools for the x402 ecosystem
Apify brings more than half of its 40,000 tools (called Actors) to the x402 ecosystem, by far the largest catalog of any provider on it today. Where existing services covered mostly general tasks, Actors from the Apify marketplace fill the missing long tail, a broad range of narrowly specialized and highly specific functions. Actors give agents real-time web data, competitor tracking, lead generation, social media monitoring, and integration with other apps and agents, exactly what they need to complete real-world tasks.

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