a shipyard manifesto · a clearing house for the agent economy

Death to Tokenmaxxing.

The wallet and the context window are the same asset class. One balance, one router, per-call settlement. This is the case for the harbor that keeps it.

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I · The Premise

This started from my own pain.

This started from my own pain as a founder trying to figure out the AI and crypto tooling space. There are so many tools and subscriptions to try. And I can never use my current subscription and context where I want to. So I end up having to cobble things together.

That is making being a hobbyist expensive. I know there is a better way.

Because here is what gets me: it's incredible that I can just make things. It's incredible that x402 lets me access software and APIs without an enterprise contract. No sales call. No procurement. No annual commit. I could just make it work.

My AI and software don't let me do the same.

II · The Problem

Your software can strand you.

I'm trying a new model and I immediately run out of my subscription credits. My context lives in one app, my credits in another, my wallet somewhere else, and none of them talk to each other. Your agent or your business can shut down over the weekend because you lose access to a fable model. Think about that. The software you pay for is allowed to strand the thing you built with it.

I like open models and things like Venice. The direction is right. But access is still gated by whoever issued the credits, the credits still expire, and the meter still sits on the wrong side of the product.

III · The Answer

So I made Open Shipyard.

Shipyard is an inference router. You hold one balance in USDC. Every call settles per call, at the model's actual price, across providers. No expiring credits. No subscription that dies at the end of the month whether you used it or not. No coin, no token — your balance is dollars, because a compute budget is not an investment thesis.

The claim underneath is simple: your wallet and your context window are the same asset class. The money you spend on inference and the access it buys should move together, with you, to whatever model or tool you want to try next. Today they live in silos and each silo charges rent. The router is the wedge that breaks that.
IV · The State

The router is live.

Per-call USDC settlement is live. The rest — a real ledger, portable context, a balance that never expires because it was never a coupon — is a design we are proving piece by piece, in the open.

I made Open Shipyard because I wanted to build something, and I wanted to build tools that get used by other developers and solo founders. People like me, who just want to make things without asking a subscription for permission.

If that's you, come build.
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