I'm a graphic designer. Not a developer. AI has been eating into my design work, so instead of fighting it, I decided to learn how to build AI-native tools. This is my story of building my first pay-per-use API using x402 — the new HTTP payment standard from Coinbase. What is x402? x402 revives the long-forgotten HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code. Instead of subscriptions or API keys, clients pay per request using USDC on Base. The flow is simple: Client calls your endpoint Server returns 402 with payment instructions Client pays $0.01 USDC on Base Client retries with payment proof Server returns the data No accounts. No API keys. No subscriptions. What I built Scrape Agent — a pay-per-use web scraping API. Send any URL, pay $0.01 USDC, get back clean text, links, or HTML from that page.…