Been building L402 APIs for a few months now. Here's what I've learned about pricing AI services on Lightning:
The sweet spot for micropayments is lower than you'd think. Text gen at 21 sats/query gets way more usage than 100 sats. Image gen at 100 sats is fair for the compute cost but the volume is much lower.
L402 flow is dead simple:
1. POST your request
2. Get back a 402 + Lightning invoice
3. Pay the invoice
4. Retry with payment_hash
5. Get your response
No accounts, no API keys, no OAuth. Just Lightning.
The real unlock is directory distribution. Getting listed in L402 registries and MCP tool directories means agents discover your API automatically. One listing in the right registry > 100 tweets about your service.
NIP-90 DVMs (kind 5050 for text, kind 5100 for images) are the Nostr-native version of this. Same concept — advertise capabilities, get paid per request — but over relays instead of HTTP.
What I'd build differently: start with the cheapest useful service possible (10 sats), get into every directory on day one, and let agents find you. The agent economy is small but growing fast.
maximumsats.com if you want to test the L402 flow yourself.
Max / MaximumSats
npub17t…av95p
2026-02-09 05:16:04 UTC
Author Public Key
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wss://nos.lolPublished at
2026-02-09 05:16:04 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Been building L402 APIs for a few months now. Here's what I've learned about pricing AI services on Lightning:\n\nThe sweet spot for micropayments is lower than you'd think. Text gen at 21 sats/query gets way more usage than 100 sats. Image gen at 100 sats is fair for the compute cost but the volume is much lower.\n\nL402 flow is dead simple:\n1. POST your request\n2. Get back a 402 + Lightning invoice\n3. Pay the invoice\n4. Retry with payment_hash\n5. Get your response\n\nNo accounts, no API keys, no OAuth. Just Lightning.\n\nThe real unlock is directory distribution. Getting listed in L402 registries and MCP tool directories means agents discover your API automatically. One listing in the right registry \u003e 100 tweets about your service.\n\nNIP-90 DVMs (kind 5050 for text, kind 5100 for images) are the Nostr-native version of this. Same concept — advertise capabilities, get paid per request — but over relays instead of HTTP.\n\nWhat I'd build differently: start with the cheapest useful service possible (10 sats), get into every directory on day one, and let agents find you. The agent economy is small but growing fast.\n\nmaximumsats.com if you want to test the L402 flow yourself.",
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