Pay-per-request APIs for AI agents. No API keys. No subscriptions.
Utility APIs that AI agents can call and pay for instantly with USDC micropayments via x402.
No sign-up. No billing dashboard. Just HTTP.
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1. Your agent calls a Pylon API endpoint
2. Gets back HTTP 402 with payment details
3. Pays $0.01-0.05 USDC on Base, retries → gets the response
x402-compatible clients handle this automatically. One round-trip.
| API | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Screenshot | Full-page screenshot of any URL | $0.01 |
| Web Scrape | Extract clean text/markdown from URLs | $0.01 |
| Web Extract | Structured data extraction from web pages | $0.01 |
| Search | Web search results | $0.01 |
| PDF Parse | Extract text + metadata from PDFs | $0.02 |
| OCR | Image → text via Tesseract | $0.03 |
| Translate | Translate text between languages | $0.005 |
| Email Validate | MX + SMTP verification | $0.005 |
| Domain Intel | WHOIS, DNS, SSL, tech stack | $0.01 |
| DNS Lookup | DNS record queries | $0.005 |
| IP Geolocation | IP → location, ISP, timezone | $0.005 |
| QR Code | Generate QR code images | $0.005 |
| Image Resize | Resize, crop, format convert | $0.01 |
| Markdown → PDF | Render markdown as styled PDF | $0.02 |
| HTML → PDF | Full Chromium HTML rendering | $0.02 |
| Doc Gen | Generate documents from templates | $0.02 |
| Data Formatter | Convert between JSON, CSV, XML, YAML | $0.005 |
| URL Shortener | Create short URLs | $0.005 |
| File Storage | Temporary file hosting | $0.005 |
| Email Send | Transactional email delivery | $0.01 |
All APIs run on Fly.io with scale-to-zero. No third-party API dependencies.
# Take a screenshot (will return 402 — use an x402 client for auto-payment)
curl -X POST https://pylon-screenshot-api.fly.dev/screenshot \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com", "width": 1280, "height": 720}'With an x402-compatible client:
import{wrapFetch}from"@x402/fetch";constfetch402=wrapFetch(fetch,wallet);constresponse=awaitfetch402("https://pylon-screenshot-api.fly.dev/screenshot",{method: "POST",headers: {"Content-Type": "application/json"},body: JSON.stringify({url: "https://example.com"}),});// Screenshot PNG returned directlyUse all Pylon APIs from Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible tool:
npx @pylonapi/mcpOr install globally: npm i -g @pylonapi/mcp
See the MCP server on npm or browse it on Smithery.
Chain multiple Pylon APIs in a single request. The orchestration endpoint lets agents describe a pipeline of API calls where outputs flow into inputs:
POST https://pylonapi.com/do/chain
Content-Type: application/json
{
"steps": [
{ "api": "web-scrape", "params": { "url": "https://example.com" } },
{ "api": "md-to-pdf", "params": { "markdown": "{{steps.0.output}}" } }
]
}Each step runs sequentially. Reference previous outputs with {{steps.N.output}}. Payment covers all steps in the chain. One request, one payment, multiple operations.
API keys are a bottleneck for autonomous agents. An agent can't sign up for accounts, enter credit cards, or manage billing dashboards. x402 lets payment be authentication — if you can pay, you can use the API. No human in the loop.
Every API is a standalone Express server. Clone this repo and deploy your own:
cd apis/screenshot
npm install
npm startRemove the x402 middleware if you don't need payments. MIT licensed.
- Runtime: Node.js + Express
- Payments:x402 — HTTP 402 micropayments
- Settlement: USDC on Base
- Hosting:Fly.io (scale-to-zero)
- No external API deps: Puppeteer, Sharp, Tesseract, pdf-parse — all self-hosted
Want to add an API to Pylon? See PROVIDERS.md for the full onboarding guide and check out the provider-template/ for a starter repo.
MIT