Introducing TaskFuel

Your agent can plan anything and reach almost nothing. So we gave it a balance and about a hundred services it can buy on its own: an inbox, a phone number, a computer by the hour, a letter in the actual mail.

TaskFuel is live today. The first $5 is on us.

Here’s why we built it.

Your agent can plan anything and reach almost nothing

Ask your agent to phone someone and tell you what they said. To make a real piece of music, not a description of one. To have an email address of its own, so it can send something and read the reply. To tell you what a flight costs right now, rather than what it cost whenever it was trained. To enrich a lead with the data sitting behind a social network’s login, or put an app on a server without you opening another account first.

All of that exists. But each one comes with a signup, another subscription, and a set of keys to look after. That’s an afternoon of work.

So you don’t bother. Your agent gets whatever toolbox you had the patience to build and works with that. Anything outside it can’t be reached, and you’re back in the loop.

How it works

TaskFuel gives your agent a budget and a catalog of a hundred specialist tools and services. It can ask what a particular call is going to cost, decide whether it’s worth paying for, and then go ahead and make it. You keep one account with TaskFuel, not one with every service in it.

Discover, evaluate, pay. That’s all it takes for an agent to get something done.

→ discover "music generation"
  Suno — POST /suno/generate-music

→ evaluate  {"customMode": false, "instrumental": true, …}
  $0.10  ·  nothing charged  ·  balance $5.00

→ pay
  track.mp3  ·  charged $0.10  ·  balance $4.90

What it can suddenly do

An inbox of its own runs $2 a month. A track from Suno, $0.10. A Linux VM at $0.01 an hour, with a public URL and a subdomain for $0.20 more.

Your agent can register a domain. It can send a physical letter.

Specialized web search across a dozen engines, company and people enrichment, SEC filings, market data, crypto prices, weather, maps, property records, translation, OCR, transcription, code execution, image and video generation, frontier models from half a dozen labs.

Any one of those is a convenience. What makes it different is chaining them into a whole workflow. An agent can enrich a lead from a network with no public API, spend half a cent confirming the business is real, write from its own address, and be there when the reply lands. Or register a domain, rent a machine for $0.01 an hour, and put the thing it just built on a public URL, all inside one run, without stopping once to ask you for a key.

Your agent doesn’t need a $99 seat to look up one company. It needs the lookup, whenever it comes up, for half a cent.

The obvious question

You’re about to hand a language model a spending limit, so it’s fair to ask how badly this can go.

Your agent spends against a balance and never touches your payment method. No single call can go above ten dollars, and you’ll be able to adjust that. Every cent is itemized as it happens. The few things that renew, an inbox among them, come out of the same balance as everything else, so if the balance is empty at renewal the inbox just lapses. An inbox nobody has touched for a month deletes itself anyway.

Worst case, something stops working. That’s the whole downside.

Why us

We’re the team behind Alby. We’ve spent years on payments, working towards a web where sending money is as easy as sending a message. This is that same work, pointed at the place it finally fits.

An agent’s problem usually isn’t intelligence. It’s reach. So we started with a catalog we picked by hand, then realised that finding a service doesn’t move anyone’s task closer to done. TaskFuel handles the buying too, and the guardrails that let you hand your agent a budget without sitting there watching it.

For the curious: how the money moves
Skip this bit if you don’t care.

There are a handful of open standards that let a service quote a price to a machine and get paid on the spot, no account and no checkout page. They’re a good thing. The catch is that there are several of them: x402, L402, MPP, with more arriving. Wire your agent up to a service yourself and you’re quietly betting on which one wins.

We don’t think that bet should be yours. We’re not adding another standard. TaskFuel sits in the middle, speaks all of them, pays whichever one a service asks for, and reports back to your agent in plain dollars.

What’s still rough

A hundred services is a thin slice of what’s actually for sale on the internet. If the thing your agent needs isn’t there, tell us. Adding services is the fastest thing we do, and right now one message is genuinely enough.

Discovery is keyword search. It’ll find you something that does the job, but it won’t tell you which of two options does it better, because we have no success rates, no ranking and no reputation layer yet. We know how we want to fix that. It’s next.

The part we’re actually excited about
Think about what your agent can do right now. That list got fixed on the day you set it up, and it doesn’t move until you go back and add something yourself.

We want it to grow without you. Every service we add is one your agent can already reach: no setup, no new account, nothing on your end at all. What it couldn’t do last month, it can do this month, while you weren’t looking.

Every service we add makes every agent out there a little more capable. That’s a good deal for everyone, and it’s why we’re doing this.

Come and try it

Connect your agent and the first $5 is on us. Go spend it.

And if you run a service you’d like agents to be able to buy, come talk to us.