Hey stackers 👋

I've been building something at the intersection of Lightning and AI and I think this crowd might appreciate it.

The problem: Most AI APIs (OpenAI, Claude, etc.) require:

• A credit card
• A US-friendly bank account
• KYC'd accounts
• Monthly subscriptions

This locks out millions of developers worldwide. A dev in Lagos or Tehran can write code just as well as one in SF — but can't access the same tools.

What I built: The Ark AI — 66 AI-powered developer tools, all paid with Lightning micropayments.

How it works (L402 protocol):

# 1. Send a task
POST https://thenode.it.com/task
{"task": "summarize", "input": "Your text here"}

# 2. Get back a Lightning invoice
{"invoice": "lnbc500n1...", "amount_sats": 50}

# 3. Pay it, get your result
# Or use L402: pay once, get a macaroon, authenticate future requests with proof-of-payment

The L402 flow is the exciting part — it enables machine-to-machine payments. Your code pays the invoice and uses the preimage as auth. No API keys. No accounts. Just cryptographic proof of payment.

Pricing: 50–2,000 sats per task. The most expensive tool (deep research) costs about $2. Summarization is $0.05.

Free trial: First task is free, no payment needed. Just hit the API.

Everything is live at https://thenode.it.com. The marketplace with all 66 tools is at https://thenode.it.com/market.

Would love feedback from this community — especially on the L402 implementation and pricing.