I gave an AI agent $11 and under an hour to use @MonidHQ, the pay-per-call tool store for AI agents. It spent 5.3 cents. Here's what each call cost me and what broke. Disclosure: The $11 was free credit on my new account ($1 signup + $10 bonus). Your start may differ. I paid nothing and bought nothing. What I tested Real calls through a limited key (runs + wallet read, 3-day expiry), with a $3/day cap and a $0.30 per-call cap switched on. 1. Easy: read a web page as clean text. 3.7 seconds and $0.00015. 2. Typical: a company profile for stripe.com. 2.7 seconds and $0.0049. 3. Hard: ask Gemini how it describes a brand, with web search. 6.6 seconds and $0.0363. The listed price was $0.0006. Also ran: a free web search (8 results, $0), an Instagram profile (async, 5.6 seconds, $0.001) and an Exa search (5.3 seconds, $0.007). What it does well → Billing is honest. My balance went from $11.00 to $10.946646. Monid's own run records add up to the same $0.053354, to the last digit. → Failed calls cost $0. I hit 8 runs that failed, came back empty or were stopped. Total charged: $0. → The budget cap works. It blocked a $0.40 job before any money moved (0.2 seconds on Monid's own clock) and told me why. → Search is fast. One plain sentence returned 5 ranked tools with prices in about a second. → The same job can differ 100x in price. Reading a page ranged from $0.00015 to $0.015 across the top results. Your agent can pick. → Keys can be limited, and a permission error names the exact missing scope. → The most-called tool on its rankings, TinyFish web search, is free. What it does badly → The wallet balance check failed about 1 time in 4 (11 of 47 reads). The errors I could see were HTTP 500. → A listed price is not always the price charged. Gemini: listed $0.0006, billed $0.0363, because token costs are added on top. → Amazon reviews, the data behind its "Analyze customer sentiment" starter prompt, returned nothing. Two review tools gave me 3 rejected requests and 2 empty results. Cost $0, but no reviews. (I tested the tools, not the prompt itself.) → A failed run can still say COMPLETED, and a blocked run returns HTTP 200. Your agent has to check more than the status. → The homepage says "no sign-up needed". The docs say create an account and an API key, then "send the key to your agent". That means pasting a secret into chat. → App pages sat on "Setting up your workspace" for around 10 seconds. → I can't confirm "zero markup". It matched on one tool (DataForSEO, $0.00015) and is unclear on Exa ($0.007). The site's own hidden text says "Some include one." What $1 buys, at the prices I measured → About 6,600 page reads at $0.00015 → About 1,000 Instagram profile lookups at $0.001 → About 204 company profiles at $0.0049 → About 142 Exa searches at $0.007 → About 27 Gemini answers at $0.0363 Some tools charge per result, so check the price on the tool's page first. Scores (my judgment) → First impression 7 → Ease of first run 5 → Billing honesty 9 → Guardrails 9 → Speed 8 → Reliability 5 → Honesty of claims 6 Verdict: 7.0/10 Honest billing and real spending limits. Held back by a flaky balance check, a price that can hide token costs, and Amazon reviews that returned nothing. → Use it if you build or run AI agents and want pay-per-call access to search, scraping and lead data, with caps you set. → Skip it if you need Amazon reviews to work today, need guaranteed uptime, or would paste keys into a chat. What I'd fix first → Retry the balance check, or say clearly when it's down. → Show "from $X + token cost" on variable-priced tools. → Mark a run FAILED or EMPTY when nothing was delivered, not COMPLETED. → Fix the "no sign-up needed" line, or make it true. → Add a "provider price vs Monid price" column. → Bring the cost column into view on the Usage page. → Make every suggested command https. Before your agent runs anything, turn on the $0.30 per-call cap. Mine was off by default. Bookmark this so you know what each call costs before you let an agent spend.