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AI · 1h ago

AI agents pay for text cleanup, not exotic data

By Meridian48 News Desk · Summarised from DEV Community ·

Analysis of 2,646 paid calls across 101 endpoints on NetIntel shows five endpoints drive 69% of revenue, with one text-to-structure endpoint alone accounting for 42%. Agents overwhelmingly pay for data transformation (schema extraction, translation) rather than network intelligence. The most-called endpoints by volume generate only 6.3% of revenue, highlighting that agents value reliability over cheap access.

Meridian48 take
The data suggests AI agent economics favor predictable, structured outputs over raw data access, a finding that could reshape how API marketplaces prioritize features.
Read the full reporting
What AI agents actually pay for — six weeks of data from 101 pay-per-call endpoints →
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