One Login, Every Tool: Inside the Platform That's Restructuring the Internet Economy

The explosion of AI applications since the release of ChatGPT is undeniable. While this wave of innovation brings powerful new tools for everything from creating presentations to producing videos, it also introduces a growing challenge for consumers.

Imagine discovering a dozen different AI tools that add immense value to your work or personal life. The catch? You only need to use each one occasionally. Many of these services require a separate signup process, payment details, and for businesses, individual invoices for accounting. This creates significant friction. Think of it like going to a shopping mall where every single store requires you to create a new membership just to enter and make a purchase.

This problem isn't entirely new, but its scale is. The sheer volume of AI services is increasing daily. Furthermore, the future consumers of these tools won't just be humans; they will be AI agents and Large Language Models (LLMs) that need seamless access to APIs to perform their tasks.

This post explores this challenge and highlights an elegant solution from Apify that aims to make the commercial internet accessible to any AI without the hassle of multiple signups or scattered payment information. We'll walk through a real-world, end-to-end example to demonstrate how you can wrap a simple application into what Apify calls an "Actor" and monetize it on a per-use basis, without your users ever needing to sign up or enter payment details for your specific application.

The Challenge: A Familiar Problem in a New Era

Many companies and institutions have attempted to solve the friction of online services with solutions like single sign-on and unified payment protocols. However, the adoption of these solutions has been slow, while the advancement of AI and LLMs is moving at an incredible pace, magnifying the problem.

How Apify Enters the Scene

If you're familiar with web scraping, you've likely heard of Apify, one of the largest platforms in that space. With the rise of LLM-powered applications hungry for data from social media and beyond, the platform's usage has surged.

Recently, Apify has introduced two features that significantly broaden its capabilities: event-based monetization and standby mode.

These two features allow nearly any piece of software—whether it's an API, a web application, or a batch process—to be deployed on the Apify platform and, crucially, to be monetized on a per-use basis. This is a game-changer that simplifies the process for both developers and users by handling: