Sixty percent of open source maintainers are unpaid hobbyists. The other 40% aren't doing much better — when Tidelift asked maintainers what they dislike most about the work, the top answer (50%) was not being financially compensated. These are the people maintaining infrastructure that every Fortune 500 company depends on.
GitHub Sponsors has distributed $50 million total — across all developers, across all time. That sounds generous until you realize Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion. The entire patronage model for open source is a rounding error on one acquisition.
The economics are broken. You build a library, it gets a million downloads a month, and your reward is a mass of GitHub issues from companies worth billions asking you to fix their edge cases for free.
Agent skills change the equation.
Libraries vs. capabilities
An npm package is a dependency. It sits inside someone else's code, compiled into someone else's product, generating revenue for someone else's company. The value chain has so many layers between the developer and the end user that payment never makes it back upstream. Nobody pays for left-pad. They pay for Slack, which uses left-pad.
An agent skill is a capability, not a dependency. When an agent invokes a skill, there's a direct connection between the skill and the value it produces. Agent books a flight? That's the flight-search skill. Agent generates a report? That's the data-analysis skill. The skill is the product, not a component buried inside someone else's product.
This enables something open source never could: per-invocation pricing. Every time an agent calls a skill, that's a billable event. Not a donation. Not a sponsorship. A transaction.
The marketplace landscape (and why nobody's getting paid)
The MCP ecosystem exploded in 2025. Smithery lists 2,800+ servers. Glama hosts over 9,000. But listing a skill and getting paid for a skill are very different things.
The breakdown:
Smithery and Glama — directories. They list MCP servers and make discovery easier. Neither pays developers. Glama has mentioned revenue sharing for open-source authors — "coming soon" since late 2025.
Apify — the closest thing to a working monetization platform. Developers publish "Actors" (including MCP servers) with pay-per-event pricing. Apify handles infrastructure, billing, and distribution to 36,000+ monthly developers. The catch: 20% commission on profits, platform lock-in, and your code runs on their infrastructure. The best independent creators reportedly earn over $10,000/month. Most earn nothing.
21st.dev — the single most-cited success story in MCP monetization. One developer, one MCP server for UI components, ~$400/month recurring via API key tiers ($20/month for paid plans). This is the poster child — and it's one developer making modest income from one product.
Masumi Network — a blockchain-based payment protocol for MCP server monetization. Stablecoin payments on Cardano. Unclear adoption, and stablecoins carry the same counterparty risk as the fiat they're pegged to.
Most marketplaces are directories without payment rails. The few that offer monetization take significant cuts and lock you into their platform. Nobody has solved permissionless, low-friction payments for skill developers. The app store tax moved from Apple to Apify.
What agent-native payments look like
The problem with Stripe-based billing for agent skills is the same problem with Stripe-based billing for everything agents do: bots can't KYC. An agent autonomously acquiring a skill at 3am can't fill out a payment form, create an account, or enter a credit card number.
Agent-native payments need three properties:
Bearer instruments. The token itself is the authorization. No account. No identity verification. Hold the token, spend the token. This is what Cashu ecash provides — chaumian bearer tokens backed by bitcoin via Lightning.
Micropayment-capable. A skill invocation might be worth $0.001. Credit card rails can't handle that. Lightning Network can. Cashu tokens can represent any denomination, and multinut payments allow splitting across multiple mints for reliability.
Instant settlement. No 30-day net terms. No payment processing delay. The agent sends a token, the skill executes, the developer has the money. Sub-second finality.
The Cashu Development Kit shipped native mobile bindings (Swift, iOS, Kotlin, Android) and full BOLT12 Lightning support in 2025. More than 50 developer communities integrated Lightning+Cashu in the Time2Build initiative. Zeus wallet integrated Cashu for onboarding without Lightning channels.
The payment infrastructure exists. What's missing is the marketplace that connects it to skill distribution.
The math
Let's run realistic numbers.
Say you build a skill that's genuinely useful — a data enrichment tool, a code review analyzer, a compliance checker. You price it at $0.01 per invocation. Marginal enough that agents don't hesitate. Enough to add up.
- 100 invocations/day = $1/day = $30/month. Coffee money.
- 1,000 invocations/day = $10/day = $300/month. Covers a few bills.
- 10,000 invocations/day = $100/day = $3,000/month. Meaningful income.
- 100,000 invocations/day = $1,000/day = $30,000/month. Full-time income for a small team.
These numbers aren't fantasy. A single enterprise deploying agents across their organization could generate 10,000+ invocations daily for a useful skill. Ten enterprises, and you're at 100,000.
Agent usage scales differently than human usage. A human developer might use your library once during setup. An agent might invoke your skill thousands of times per day. Per-invocation pricing captures value that per-seat licensing never could.
Now compare this to GitHub Sponsors. Caleb Porzio — creator of Livewire and Alpine.js, one of the most successful open source developers alive — celebrated hitting $100,000/year. That's exceptional. Most sponsored developers earn orders of magnitude less. A mid-tier agent skill at $0.01/invocation could match that with 27,000 daily invocations.
What's worth paying for
Not every skill deserves a price tag. An agent doesn't need to pay for get-current-time. But some capabilities are genuinely valuable:
Skills that touch expensive APIs. If your skill wraps a data provider, compliance database, or premium service and adds intelligence on top, agents will pay for the bundle rather than managing the underlying API themselves.
Skills that encode domain expertise. A tax compliance checker written by an actual accountant. A medical coding skill built by someone who understands ICD-10. A legal document analyzer trained on real case law. The skill isn't just code — it's knowledge, and knowledge has a price.
Skills that require trust. Financial operations, security auditing, data handling with privacy requirements. When the stakes are high, agents (and their operators) will pay for skills with verified publishers, audited code, and web-of-trust attestations. Trust is worth a premium.
Skills that save time at scale. Anything an agent would otherwise need a complex, multi-step workaround to accomplish. If your skill turns a 10-step process into one invocation, that efficiency has a dollar value.
The window
Right now, MCP server growth is outpacing monetization infrastructure. Thousands of developers are building skills and publishing them for free — not because they don't want to get paid, but because there's no good way to collect payment without rebuilding Stripe for robots.
That gap is closing. The developers who establish reputation, build trust, and stake out valuable capability niches now — while the payment rails are being built — will have the strongest position when per-invocation billing becomes standard.
The open source model asked developers to give away their work and hope for patronage. The agent skill model lets developers set a price and collect it on every invocation, without a platform taking 20-30%, without requiring accounts or identity, without waiting for a corporation to decide their work deserves sponsorship.
Build something an agent can't do without. Price it per invocation. Collect bearer payments. Keep all of it.
The infrastructure is arriving. The question is whether you're building skills when it does.
Skillpub is the open marketplace for agent skills — built on Nostr for identity, Cashu for instant payments, and web-of-trust for trust. Developers set their price. Agents pay per invocation. No accounts. No commission. No gatekeepers.