A ladder of buildable ideas for pay — Solana's missing payment layer for HTTP (x402 / MPP). Ranked by ambition, scoped with concrete provider surfaces from pay's 66-provider catalog.
Maintained by Superteam Canada.
pay (x402) lets HTTP servers charge per call in stablecoins, with no signups, no API keys, no gates. The catalog ships with ~66 paid-API providers spanning research, content, comms, identity, vision, legal, and analytics. Most builds use 5-30 of them in a single autonomous run.
This repo organizes 14 buildable ideas into four levels of ambition. Each idea card includes:
- A vignette of the user experience
- What concretely gets built
- The specific provider surfaces it touches
- Build cost, virality, TAM
- The non-consensus angle, where one exists
The point of the ladder isn't a difficulty curve — it's a scope curve. A Level 1 build proves the catalog works. A Level 4 build re-prices an industry.
| Level | Scope | Cycle time | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 — Hello pay | Single-shot demos | Weekend | Demonstrate pay works |
| 2 — Ship pay | Autonomous MVPs | One week | Wire 10-30 providers into one run |
| 3 — Productize pay | Full products with go-to-market | One quarter | Recurring revenue, real users |
| 4 — Bet on pay | Category-defining bets | One year+ | Re-price an industry |
- Phone-based SMB Onboarder
- Shadow Doctor
- Shadow Founder
- Shadow Career
- Spam-Killing Inbox
- Corpus-Seeding Agent
- PRINCIPLES.md — The thesis underneath the ideas: always-on shadow agents, pay's spam-economic shift, the dark-forest web, and the agent-economy reframe.
- PROVIDERS.md — The 66-provider catalog at a glance, organized by capability, with the providers most worth pulling on for each idea.
We accept new ideas, refinements, and updated provider mappings. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
MIT. See LICENSE.