I built a contractor-license Actor that AI agents call and pay for on their own

I don't have an audience. No newsletter, no Twitter following, no YouTube channel. Every product I shipped before this one died the same way: a human had to discover it, and no humans knew I existed. So I flipped the buyer. An AI agent doesn't care about my follower count. It picks tools by spec, reliability, and price — from a registry it can search on its own. If I could ship a tool that agents discover, call, and pay for without a human in the loop, my distribution problem would stop mattering. That's what license-verify is: an Apify Actor that verifies a US contractor's license, surety bond, and insurance from official state data, exposed via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) so AI clients like Claude can call it mid-conversation, priced pay-per-event at $0.03 per successful lookup. Here's how I built it, the input-schema decisions that made it agent-callable, and the one-line billing bug that silently made every call free. Why contractor licenses I run a side business building tools for small contractor shops, so I knew the pain firsthand: before a homeowner (or a general contractor, or an insurance adjuster) hires a roofer, someone should check the license is active, the surety bond is real, and the insurance hasn't lapsed. In Washington State, all three live in the Department of Labor & Industries' open-data API on data.wa.gov. Most tools that "verify licenses" scrape an HTML page and return a status string. The official JSON gives you the actual bond amount and the insurance carrier. That's the difference between "probably fine" and "verified." It's also a perfect agent task: a small, well-defined question ("is ECOSTSC758NN licensed, bonded, insured?") with a structured answer an agent can act on. An AI assistant helping someone plan a renovation can reach for it mid-task, the same way it reaches for a calculator. The stack: one codebase, two doors The core is a TypeScript verification engine with a provider-per-state design. It ships through two doors: An Ap