I built 116 AI tools into one API — and added crypto payments

#webdev

For the past few months I've been building AI agents that need to call a lot of different APIs: web search, news, weather, stock prices, crypto data, email validation, image generation...

Every one has a different key, different rate limit, different response format. It's a mess.

So I built Arch Tools — 116 AI tools behind a single API key.

What it is

One endpoint. One key. Every tool normalized to the same response format.

curl -X POST https://archtools.dev/v1/tools/web-search \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "latest AI news", "limit": 5}'

import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://archtools.dev/v1/tools/crypto-price",
    headers={"x-api-key": "YOUR_KEY"},
    json={"symbol": "BTC"}
)
print(response.json())

Same pattern. Every time. Whether you're calling web search, sentiment analysis, WHOIS lookup, or barcode scanning.

The x402 twist

HTTP status code 402 (Payment Required) has been in the spec since 1991 but was marked "reserved for future use." We implemented it.

AI agents can now pay per API call with USDC on Base — no subscription, no billing setup, no credit cards. The agent pays for exactly what it uses.

POST /v1/tools/web-search
→ HTTP 402 Payment Required (if no credits)
→ Agent pays 0.001 USDC on Base
→ Request retried automatically
→ HTTP 200 OK

We verified our first on-chain payment last week. This is what AI agent economics should look like — micropayments at the infrastructure layer.

MCP Support

Every tool is also available via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Point Claude, GPT, or Cursor at our MCP server and your agent gets all 116 tools automatically discovered — no manual integration required.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arch-tools": {
      "url": "https://arch-tools-mcp.onrender.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Add that to your Claude Desktop config and you're done.

What's included

The 116 tools span:

Search: web search, news, academic papers, image search
Finance: crypto prices, stock data, market cap, fear & greed index
Data: weather, currency exchange, IP lookup, WHOIS
AI: text generation, sentiment analysis, summarization
Validation: email, phone, URL, domain checks
Media: image generation, barcode/QR, OCR

Get started

1,000 free credits — no credit card required.

→ archtools.dev

If you build something with it, I'd love to hear about it.

DEV Community