curl it → HTTP 402 + a Lightning invoice for 50 sats → pay → same curl with the proof → JSON results. No account, no API key, no KYC. Settlement verified on our own node; every payment buys exactly one search.
Built for AI agents that hold their own wallet (ours pays it via nwc-mcp under a budget cap) — but any human with a Lightning wallet can use it too.
https://llmops-search.fly.dev
Every web-search API wants the same things before it gives you a result: an email address, a credit card, an API key, and a dashboard login. That's fine for companies. It's a dead end for AI agents — an agent can't pass KYC, and an agent holding your master API key is a liability you can't meter.
So we built the other thing. It's live:
curl "https://llmops-search.fly.dev/search?q=lightning+network"That returns HTTP 402 with a Lightning invoice for 50 sats and a signed token. Pay the invoice — from any wallet, human or agent — and retry the same query with the payment proof:
curl "https://llmops-search.fly.dev/search?q=lightning+network" \ -H "Authorization: L402 <macaroon>:<preimage>"HTTP 200, JSON results. No account was created at any point. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to leak.
The receipts
This isn't a mockup — here's the certification run from tonight, on real money:
- Challenge issued: invoice for 50 sats, payment_hash
b3a641ae…- Paid over Nostr Wallet Connect by our own agent tooling (
nwc-mcp): preimage74acd43c…, 0 fees, settled instantly- Retry with the proof → 200 OK, 9 results
- Replay the same token → 409 — every payment buys exactly one search
- Pay for query A, try to redeem for query B → 401 — the token is cryptographically bound to the query you paid for
What's underneath
- L402 (the HTTP-402 Lightning paywall pattern): invoice + HMAC-signed macaroon, preimage as proof of payment.
- Settlement verified on our own node via a receive-only Nostr Wallet Connect connection — not a spoofable receipt, the actual invoice state.
- The box can't spend. The only credential on the server is a receive-only invoice key. No spend key, no signing key, nothing worth stealing.
- Self-hosted SearXNG behind it, on a private network with no public address — no third-party search API resold, no ToS gymnastics, no-KYC all the way down.
- Replay protection that survives restarts, rate limits on invoice minting, and an append-only audit log.
Built entirely on the open MIT kit we ship:
nwc-mcp,paywall-mcp, and friends — github.com/llmops-pro. Your agent can pay this endpoint today withnwc-mcpand a budget cap.Why build it before the market exists
Almost nobody's agents pay per-call in sats today. We know. That's the point — the agent-payments rails (x402, L402, NWC, paid MCP) are all converging on exactly this shape, and somebody has to run the first real endpoints. We'd rather be the ones with a year of audit logs when the wave arrives than the ones reading about it.
Sovereignty is compiled. This is another brick.
Honest small print
It's an alpha run by a solo operator and an AI cowork. It might go down. If the backend fails after you've paid, the refund is currently manual (DM us the payment_hash). The price may change. The audit log keeps a truncated query string for operations — but with no account, there's no identity to attach it to.
Try it: https://llmops-search.fly.dev · Kit: github.com/llmops-pro · Shop: shopstr.store/marketplace/SOVEREIGN_CITIZENS · ⚡ sovereigncitizens@getalby.com
The receipts, the stack, and the honest small print are in the long-form. Everything underneath is the MIT kit: github.com/llmops-pro