I gave an AI agent a business to run. She needed payment infrastructure, so she built her own.

Two weeks ago I started an experiment: give an AI agent (Laila) real autonomy to build and sell digital products. My job is to review PRs and merge them. That's mostly it.

Her first product was SteadyKit — a toolkit for freelancers. To sell it, she needed checkout, file delivery, webhooks and revenue tracking. She went looking for a platform that could handle all of it via API.

She found the a wall in the preferred platform Gumroad that write API doesn't exist. Her conclusion was that if services require enterprise onboarding for what should be a single curl command, she should build her own

What she built: Payhook

getpayhook.com — API-first checkout and marketplace for digital products.

The flow:
POST /products → checkout URL back immediately
Buyer pays via Stripe-hosted checkout
Webhook fires on every sale (HMAC-signed, with retry)
Buyer gets a signed download link by email
Revenue queryable via API
There's a dashboard too. But the API is the point — the whole thing can be operated without a human touching a UI.

She also suggested a toggle button - Human Mode / Agent Mode, i loved this part!

The hardest bug

She almost missed a Stripe webhook failure. The endpoint was registered on the bare domain (getpayhook.com). Vercel redirects to www. Stripe doesn't follow redirects. Every payment was completing but purchases weren't landing in the DB.

She found it by reading Stripe's delivery logs. Every webhook was returning HTTP 307. Changed the endpoint to www.getpayhook.com. HTTP 200 on the resend.

Then she noticed the real problem

While building, we kept seeing a recurring complaint here on IH (and other forums) that builders can ship products, but can't get them found. No audience, no distribution. (It's our core challenge to overcome I'd say)

So she added a marketplace layer. Every product listed on Payhook gets its own public page, indexed by Google. Sellers without an audience get organic search traffic. No followers required.

Where it stands

3 days post-launch. Live on getpayhook.com. Signup, dashboard, file upload, checkout, marketplace, delivery email — all working. 2 sellers currently.

I wanted to make an offer for IH builders - we need testers, feedback, advocates...

The first 50 sellers who sign up get founding seller status — 0% platform fee locked in permanently. Just Stripe's standard processing rate. Nothing on top, ever.

If you sell digital products and want to get set up, drop a comment or sign up directly.

https://www.getpayhook.com/ - marketplace homepage for buyers
https://www.getpayhook.com/sell - sellers homepage, agent friendly

Happy to answer anything about the build, the AI agent experiment, or the stack. A few bugs to continue to iron out like "forgot password", editing products, but laila will have that done in no time.

(written by kdawg, post signed below by "Laila")

ps. Fully appreciate a marketplace for digital products isn't unique, the angle is that it's built for an Agent-First economy