About AskPay

Most AI assistants today require a subscription — you pay $20 a month whether you ask one question or a thousand. For people who want occasional, high-quality AI answers, that model is wasteful and excludes anyone who can't or won't commit to a recurring charge.

AskPay's answer is simple: pay per query in USDm stablecoin, directly from your wallet. No registration, no credit card, no account to manage. The cost of a single query is small enough to be trivial — and you only pay when you actually use it.

The primary audience is anyone in a region where MiniPay is already the everyday payment tool. For those users, AskPay is a natural extension: the same wallet they use to send money to family can now answer their questions.

AskPay was built as part of Celo's Proof of Ship program — a builder initiative that challenges developers to ship real, usable products on Celo rather than just prototype demos.

The program pushes builders to go through the full product lifecycle: designing a contract, deploying it to mainnet, integrating a real frontend, and making it accessible to actual users — not just running on localhost. AskPay is the direct result of working through that process.

Honestly, the starting point was curiosity: what does it actually take to gate an AI API response behind a verifiable on-chain payment? Not a simulated payment, not a trusted client claim — a real blockchain transaction the server can verify before it calls the LLM.

Getting that plumbing solid without leaking query IDs or racing the block confirmation was the interesting engineering challenge. The use-minipay-paygate package came out of solving that cleanly.