For fifteen years my job has been answering the same handful of questions for brands. Is this creator's audience real? Does this ad hook work before we spend on it? Where do we rank, and who is getting cited instead of us? I answered them with spreadsheets, a few paid tools and a lot of hours.
This year the people asking those questions started to change. More and more, it isn't a person opening a dashboard. It is an AI agent, running inside Claude, ChatGPT or a developer's script, trying to get an answer on behalf of a person. And that agent runs into a wall every SaaS product has: a sign-up form, an email verification, a credit card page. An agent can do none of that.
What it can do is pay. So I built it an MCP server and a pay-per-call API.
What Exepal is: an MCP server, an x402 API and seven tools
Exepal is a set of single-purpose tools priced per call. One question in, one price, one JSON answer out. There are no accounts and no API keys. An agent reads exepal.com/llms.txt or tools.json, posts to an endpoint, gets back an HTTP 402 with the price, pays it in USDC on Base, and receives the answer. The whole exchange takes seconds and no human has to be in the loop.
If you work in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, you don't even need the endpoints. Exepal runs its own MCP server at api.exepal.com/mcp, so you can ask in plain language ("is this creator's audience real?") and the tool is called and paid for behind the scenes.
Humans are welcome too. Five of the tools are on the Apify Store, where a marketer can run them with a normal card and pay only for what they use. Nothing is monthly.
AI brand visibility. Do ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity recommend your brand, or your competitor? ($0.50 quick / $3 report / $7 deep)
Creator vetting. Fake-follower risk, engagement quality and an estimated UGC rate for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube profiles ($0.20 / profile)
Ad creative score. Scores a UGC or paid-social script and suggests rewrites ($0.25 / creative)
SERP + AI answer monitor. Google rank, AI Overview citations and AI mentions per keyword, diffed against your last run ($0.70 / 10 keywords)
Company enrichment. A company profile from a domain ($0.10 / company)
Domain intel. Registration, DNS, email security, hosting, tech stack, risk flags ($0.005 / domain)
Page reader. Any public URL as clean markdown with metadata ($0.005 / page)
If you have ever run an influencer programme, a paid-social account or an SEO retainer, you will recognise every one of these. They are the checks I have done by hand for beauty, media, beverage and automotive brands, and for a few fast-growing companies that would rather I didn't say more than that. Now they are endpoints.
Why per call, and why agents
The honest answer is that I got tired of subscriptions. Every tool in the marketing stack wants $99 a month for a feature you use four times a quarter. A per-call price is fairer to the buyer and, it turns out, it is the only price an agent can pay at all. An agent cannot hold a subscription. It can hold a wallet.
Agents are becoming software customers. They don't fill in forms. They read a price and decide.
The 402 status code has sat in the HTTP spec since 1997, labelled "Payment Required" and reserved for future use. The future turned up. The x402 protocol uses it exactly as intended: the server names a price, the client pays, the server answers. For a founder it means I don't need a billing team, a dunning sequence or a fraud desk. For the agent it means no friction at all.
Under the hood each tool pulls from more than one upstream (models, search, public data) so no single provider can switch the business off, every answer is cached for 24 hours, and the price is a multiple of what the call costs me. That margin is the whole business model. It is a small API with a very clear till.
Who it is for, right now
AI agents and the developers who build them. Seven tools behind api.exepal.com, a stable schema, published prices, and an MCP server so Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can call them in plain language.
Growth and marketing teams. The questions you used to send to an analyst or an agency, answered in under a minute from an Apify balance. No contract, no seat licence.
Agencies and consultants. The same checks I run before taking on a client, for your own pre-sales. Run a brand through AI visibility and you will have something to say in the first meeting that nobody else in the room has.
Partners and investors. If you believe, as I do, that a meaningful share of software revenue will soon come from non-human buyers, Exepal is a working, revenue-taking example of what that looks like. I am happy to talk.
Where it goes next
Today Exepal is seven tools and two payment rails. The near-term plan is to deepen rather than widen: more of the questions a growth team asks every week, each one as a single endpoint with a single price, and better monitoring so the answers improve with every run. I also want the tools to show up wherever agents shop, which today means the Apify Store and MCP directories, and tomorrow means whatever catalogue agents learn to read first.
The longer bet is simpler. Every business will eventually have two kinds of customers: people and the agents working for them. Most companies are not ready for the second kind. Building Exepal is how I am getting ready, and it is already changing the advice I give the brands I work with.
Try it
If you run marketing for a brand, start with the AI brand visibility check at exepal.com. It takes a minute and the result is usually uncomfortable in a useful way. If you are building agents, the docs are at exepal.com/docs and llms.txt will tell your agent everything it needs. And if you would rather have someone who has done this for fifteen years look at your numbers with you, you know where to find me.
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Laxman Kafle
I am a serial entrepreneur and growth consultant with 15+ years in performance marketing and AI. I founded EveMoo Tech, Socialji and eVTOL.Travel, and I help founders and brands grow, quietly and under NDA.
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