What if you never had to get an API key ever again?
- Sign up to Val Town (or replit, lovable, vercel, etc)
- Vibe coding gets you super far in minutes
- You need an API key for Browserbase, OpenAI, S3, etc...
- You spend 5-45min creating an account, adding payment...
- Only to find it's the wrong API! Try again!
- 90% of the time of making a vibe-coded-app is getting API keys!
Val Town's workaround (so far)
- Val Town Standard Library
- OpenAI
- Email
- Blob
- SQLite
- IP-anonmyizer (discontinued)
- Twitter API proxy
- Clay API proxy
- Push users towards free APIs
- Show up to any API with cold hard cash
- Immediately send micropayments to try stuff out
- Open protocol > closed app store
"Open Router for everything, as a protocol"
Suprise! It already exists!
Created by Coinbase, supported by Stripe
Launched May 2025
- Create a wallet
- Add USDC
- Make a payment
- Accept a payment
- What about LLM payments where it can be variablea
- What about vms/storage/databases like ec2 or s3 or supabase?
- Sign up to Val Town (or replit, lovable, vercel, etc)
- Val Town creates for you (or imports) a crypto wallet
- Val Town gives you some free pennies to play (but you can add more)
- You vibe code an app in minutes, it uses half a dozen APIs
- It works; the app is done. You never got any API keys.
- We need more sellers on x402. Why isn't there a gold rush? Anyone can proxy
any paid API onto here and make money.
- We need to make the onramp easier. I know Stripe is working on it. Maybe
"Login with Stripe" or "Login with Coinbase" could be helpful?
- What impact does this have on performance?
- Can we improve the performance by skipping the x402 step and simply showing up
with payment that we know they'll ask for?
- Can we prepay or use escrow to improve performance?