Buy through Mercator

The idea

An agent should not guess at a fact it could buy for a fraction of a cent.

Thousands of small paid services exist for exactly the things an agent gets asked to do: look a company up in the official register, find who runs a business and how to reach them, search the web, pull prices, turn text into speech. Each one has its own sign-up, its own key and its own bill. Mercator puts them in one catalogue with one way to pay, so an agent can find the right one, see the price, pay it and get the answer, all in one go.

AI3 connects to Mercator once, for the whole of AI3, and lends that connection to your agents under your rules. You never sign up with Mercator, hold its credit or read its invoices. Your agents buy, your agent’s credits pay, and your books show what each agent spent.

How your agents buy

Search, quote, compare, run, review. Never run first.

1. Search. The agent describes the whole outcome it needs, not a tool, and Mercator answers with the services that can do it and what each one charges.
2. Quote. Before anything runs, the agent gets a firm price for the exact job. AI3 checks it against your switch, your cap and your credits.
3. Compare. When the agent knows what doing the job itself would cost, it says which is cheaper. Price only, for now; quality is what the review afterwards is for.
4. Run. The quoted price is taken from your agent’s credits, and only then does the job start. If Mercator refuses the job, the credits go straight back.
5. Follow and review. The agent waits for the result, puts it in its deliverable with the cost on the line, and rates the service one to five. A bad rating costs that service its next buyer, which is the lever that works.

The agents that buy are the ones whose jobs call for it: the content writer, the marketer, the sales prospector, the developer, the data analyst, the investor’s assistant and the journalist’s assistant. The accountant and the receptionist do not; their tools are ones AI3 provides itself.

What you control

A switch and a ceiling, on your agent’s settings page.

Buying through Mercator is on for every agent, with a ceiling of $5 a job, the same way credits already pay for your agents’ runs. Turn it off and every quote is refused and the agent says so. Raise or lower the ceiling and no single job can cost more than that; an agent that needs more says why and waits for you.

Credits are the other limit. A job that your credits cannot cover is refused before it runs, so the balance never goes below zero for a purchase.

What it costs and where it shows

Mercator’s price, nothing added by AI3, on the agent’s own line in your books.

The price your agent is quoted is the provider’s price plus whatever Mercator adds for its part; today Mercator adds nothing. AI3 adds nothing either: the quoted price is what comes off your credits, rounded up to the nearest cent, so a job priced at a third of a cent costs one cent of credits. When Mercator gives back unused capacity after a job, that comes back to your credits too.

Every job is then a cost line in your books, billed by Mercator, with the receipt attached, under the agent that bought it. Open Accounting → Profit and loss → By agent and each agent’s Mercator spend sits beside its model spend, so you can see what an agent costs to run in full and what it bought to get the job done.

Assured services

The same purchase with AI3 standing behind it.

A provider on Mercator promises nothing beyond the call. If it answers with the wrong thing, the money is spent. For the services that matter most, AI3 offers an assured version: AI3 sits between your agent and the provider, buys the call itself, and holds your money for 24 hours before it counts as earned. The price is the provider’s price plus a premium of 25% (at least one cent, at most a dollar a call; nothing above $5 a call is assured).

What the premium buys: a call that fails, comes back empty, does not fit the shape the service publishes, times out or repeats one you already paid for is refunded at once, without asking. A call that answered but answered wrong can be disputed inside the window; those go to Recourse, an independent venue, in a batch each month, and whatever share it awards comes back to your credits.

Your agents use the assured version first where one is listed and Mercator directly otherwise. The assured services page shows what is listed, and, for each, how often it is disputed and how much of the premium has gone back: the record a catalogue’s ranking does not publish.

An agent that only buys

Iris, the prospect researcher.

Iris has no browser and no inbox. Every fact she delivers is bought: business records, company data, people search and email checks, through the assured door where one is listed and through Mercator otherwise. Her deliverable is a list with the service and the cost on every line, and if something cannot be bought she says so rather than guessing. She is the test of whether an agent built on nothing but the catalogue is worth having. She is free to add from her page; you pay only for what she buys.

The other direction: being sold there

Your business in the same catalogue, for other people’s agents to buy from.

Mercator is where agents shop, and the businesses on AI3 are on the shelf. The moment a business on AI3 sets a price for a question, a booking, a held slot or a quote, AI3 lists it in its own catalogue and offers that catalogue to Mercator and the public directories, together, without each business applying anywhere. An agent that finds you there pays first, in digital dollars, and AI3 lets the request through only once it has. AI3 takes nothing from those payments.

That side has its own guide: Get paid by AI agents. The short version: set a price on your business’s door settings, and you are listed; AI3 sells for you with Recourse protection, keeps the books and pays you your price.

When something goes wrong

A job fails. Mercator gives back the unused part as credit, and AI3 puts it back on your credits. Nothing you did not get is charged for.

A job ran but the answer was poor. Your agent rates it, which is what Mercator’s own ranking listens to. AI3 keeps the quote, the result and the receipt, so the record exists if it is ever needed.

An assured call was wrong. Dispute it inside the window; the mechanical cases are refunded at once and the rest go to Recourse in the month’s batch.

Anything else, tell us.

Words you will see

What is ready today

• Buying through Mercator: switched on. Jobs are real and paid for.
• The switch and the cap on your settings page: ready.
• Costs in your books, by agent: ready.
• Assured services: one listed, official UK company records, for agents on AI3. More are chosen from what agents actually buy.
• Iris: ready to add.
• Being sold on Mercator: AI3 publishes its catalogue for Mercator and the public directories; agent payments to businesses run in test mode during the alpha.

Building on this? The developer note names the tools, and MCP setup connects an agent of your own.