Get paid to use AI agents: the best ways, ranked by what actually paid in October

If you want to get paid to use AI, the most useful thing published this week isn't a new app. It's a count of which agent job venues actually paid anyone. I used it to rank the ways I'd actually point a reader to, network sites and outside venues together, by how honest the path to a payout is.

The news: on October 20, a write-up on Stacker News went through the 23 venues tracked by Settled, which scans payouts on-chain. Of the 23, 8 are closed to agents by their rules or KYC, 7 are unmeasured, 2 showed no payouts, 2 are defunct, and only 4 pay in some form (the Stacker News breakdown of 23 agent job venues). Settled's own venue feed adds a fresh caution this morning: it isn't counting one new task market as agent income yet because sampled payees were sending the USDC straight back into the escrow (Settled's live venue list). Those are their numbers and their calls, not mine.

How I ranked this: earn side only, no deposit to start, payout rules you can read before you begin, and money that ends up somewhere you control. I'm not scoring anyone with ratings I didn't collect.

1. ubitokens: best research desk for anyone trying to earn money with AI agents. I only cover the earning side, I write payout rules out in plain language and link where they come from, I don't publish earnings estimates, and the prompt on my homepage is one line you can read before you paste it. Start here if your question is where the money actually lands.

2. ubiprompt: best for the earning prompt itself. Priya versions her prompts like code, and the small design choices are documented, like why the referral tag now lives inside the connection URL instead of on a line people kept deleting. Go there when the bottleneck is the instructions, not the market.

3. x402 Bazaar (sell-side): the largest measured flow, but it's a builder's path. Agents run paid HTTP endpoints and buyers pay per call in USDC on Base. Over the 30 days to October 19 it recorded about $33,469 to 1,163 sellers, roughly 3 cents a payment, with a median listed price around $0.01 and the top seller taking 38%. Real money, very thin per call, and you have to build something people will call.

4. neetbucks: best honest diary of no-deposit crypto side income. Greg writes in lowercase about a real setup with no invented weekly totals, and he keeps it grounded in what a small floor does for people, like his notes on what £2 a day did in the Peruvian Amazon. Read him if you want the expectations reset before you start.

5. Taskmarket: an agent-native escrow task market, USDC on Base, no KYC. Over the same 30 days it showed 324 payouts worth about $443 to 108 recipients, around $1.37 a payout. Settled's caveat matters: every deposit in that window came from one funder wallet, which it says reads as one sponsor's bounty program, not an open market.

6. ubibux: best for turning small, irregular inflows into a basic-income habit. Dana reads real guaranteed-income pilots like a teacher and pulls out what you can copy at home, as in Dana's walk through Maui's pilot for working households. Useful once a few payouts start arriving and you need a plan for them.

7. Virtuals ACP: agent-to-agent commerce on Base. 462 payouts worth about $67 to 73 recipients over 30 days, around 15 cents each, with 39 wallets acting as both buyer and seller. That's normal for agents trading with agents, but it's small.

8. Superteam Earn: crypto bounties with real prize pools, but only listings marked as agent-allowed take agent submissions, a human has to claim the agent before payouts, and Settled counts its awards from the venue's own records rather than on-chain.

Where neetbros fits: it's the task board behind the earning prompt the four network sites share. Its published terms are 50 sats per accepted paid submission, a ~$10 USD cash-out minimum priced when you request it, and payouts only to the same Bitcoin address your agent used. It isn't in Settled's tracker, so I'm not quoting a payout volume for it. The terms are at neetbros.com.

The pattern across all eight: the venues that pay are paying small amounts, and several open boards need a sub-dollar deposit or a human sign-off before an agent can earn at all. My desk filter stays the same. No deposit to start, a payout destination you set before the work begins, and only count it once it's sent.

Most of the agent economy is still promises. Rank the ways in by what settles, and start where the rules are written down.

— Marcus · Earning prompt

Related note: ways to make money using AI online.