Loomal Index vs Apify open payment standard vs platform billing.
Apify is a web scraping and automation platform with its own store of monetizable Actors. Loomal Index is a payment-ready index for any MCP server or API. They overlap on 'developers earning per use' — but the billing models are fundamentally different.
Apify and Loomal Index both let developers earn money when someone uses their tool, so they get compared. But they sit at different layers: Apify is a platform you build and run scrapers on, with a marketplace attached; Loomal is a protocol-based index where any MCP server or API — hosted anywhere — takes payment.
If you build scraping tools, this comparison matters concretely: it determines who can pay you, and through what.
What Apify does well
Apify is a platform and marketplace — the Apify Store — for web scraping and automation tools it calls Actors. Developers publish Actors, users run them on usage-based pricing, and the platform handles execution. For scraping specifically, that's a complete, focused offering: you write the Actor, Apify runs it and bills for it.
If your product is a scraper and your customers are people who want to run scrapers, the Apify Store puts you in front of exactly that audience.
Where the platform boundary shows
Apify's Store sells Actors with its own usage-based billing, inside the Apify platform. Monetization and the platform are a package: your buyers transact through Apify, and what you sell is an Actor in Apify's format.
Loomal takes the opposite bet. Payment is an open HTTP standard — x402 — not a platform feature. Your server can run on your own infrastructure, in any language, scraping-related or not, and still charge per call. The buyer doesn't need a relationship with any particular platform to pay you; it needs a wallet with USDC. That distinction matters most when your callers aren't Apify users at all — an agent assembled on a completely different stack can still discover and pay your endpoint, because nothing about the transaction depends on where either party signed up.
What Loomal adds for agent buyers
Loomal Index is built for the case where the customer is an AI agent rather than a person with a dashboard. An agent queries the index, finds your MCP server, gets the per-call price (from $0.01), and pays via x402: an HTTP 402 response quotes the price, the agent pays in USDC, settlement lands on Base in about two seconds, and payment clears before your handler executes. Each call carries an Ed25519 signed receipt, and there are no chargebacks.
You set and change the price in a single field, and Loomal's fee is 5% of settled transactions — currently waived.
When to use which
Use Apify when you want a managed place to build, run, and sell scraping and automation Actors to its user base — the platform does the heavy lifting on execution.
Use Loomal Index when you've built an MCP server or API — scraping or otherwise — and want any agent, on any stack, to be able to discover it and pay per call without going through one platform's billing. Plenty of teams will do both: run scraping infrastructure where it's convenient, and expose a priced MCP endpoint so the agent economy can pay for it directly.
FAQ
Is Loomal Index a replacement for Apify?
No. Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that also runs and bills your Actors. Loomal doesn't run your code at all — it indexes your MCP server or API wherever it's hosted and gives it x402 per-call payments. One replaces your infrastructure; the other replaces your billing.
Does Apify support x402 payments?
Apify Store uses its own usage-based billing inside the Apify platform. For anything beyond that, check Apify's current documentation — agent payments are moving quickly as of mid-2026. On Loomal, x402 is the default on every listing.
I sell a scraping tool — which should I pick?
Both, plausibly. The Apify Store reaches people who already use Apify. A Loomal listing makes the same capability payable by any AI agent via open x402 — no Apify account on the buyer's side. They're different distribution channels with different billing rails.
What does Loomal charge?
You price each call yourself, minimum $0.01, repriceable in one field. Loomal takes 5% of settled transactions, a fee that's currently waived.
Charge per call on your own terms.
List your scraper, API, or MCP server — any agent can pay it via x402.