I built a pay-per-use web scraping API with Claude's help — free to try, $0.01/call after that
I'm a designer learning to code, and over the past few months I've been building my first real API with Claude as my coding partner. The result is Scrape Agent — a web scraping API built on the x402 micropayment protocol.
What it does:
Extract clean text, links, HTML, or metadata from any public URL. No API key, no subscription, no account needed. You just call the endpoint and pay $0.01 USDC on Base per scrape — or nothing if you're just testing.
How Claude helped:
Honestly, I couldn't have built this without Claude. I had zero backend experience. Claude walked me through every step — Express.js setup, x402 middleware integration, OpenAPI spec, the .well-known/x402 manifest for agent autodiscovery, deployment on Google Cloud. It was a real pair-programming experience across many sessions.
Why x402:
The x402 protocol means AI agents can call and pay for the API autonomously — no human in the loop, no billing account, just wallet-to-wallet USDC micropayments. Perfect for agent pipelines that need web data on demand.
Free to try:
The endpoint returns a valid 402 response you can inspect without paying anything. Full OpenAPI spec at /openapi.json.
Website: https://scrapeagent.xyz
MCP version (for Claude/Cursor): https://scrape-agent-mcp.vercel.app
Happy to answer any questions — especially from other non-coders trying to build in this space. Still learning every day.
