Where to sell AI agent skills in 2026

What selling an agent skill means in 2026

Selling an AI agent skill means charging for a written method an agent can load and follow — instructions, steps, and judgment, usually packaged as a SKILL.md file — either by selling the file itself or by selling metered access to runs of it.

Those two models are the whole market. Every marketplace below is a variation on one of them, and the difference decides what happens after your first sale. Sell the file and each buyer holds a complete, forwardable copy of the method. Sell runs and buyers get outcomes while the file stays on the platform's servers. Fees, storefronts, and categories vary from platform to platform; that axis doesn't.

The marketplaces, compared

Facts are from each platform's public pages, current as of August 2026. Where a platform doesn't publish a figure, the cell says so.

Free catalogs: reach, not revenue

skills.sh, SkillsMP, and ClaudeSkills.info are free catalogs: the source is exposed on install, and there is no per-call seller revenue, because nothing is being sold.

That isn't a flaw — it's the point. If what you want is reputation, the credit for being the person who wrote the skill other people's agents run, a free catalog gives you distribution no paid marketplace matches, and open source is the honest format for it. Publish your generally useful work there. The question this page answers is what to do with the one skill you'd rather be paid for.

File marketplaces: one-time sales

Agensi and PromptBase are the established paid routes, and both ship the file. Agensi delivers the SKILL.md to the buyer and pays creators roughly 70%; its answer to copying is detection after the fact — fingerprint-based piracy reporting and DMCA takedowns. PromptBase, the incumbent prompt marketplace, now lists SKILL.md skills alongside prompts; the buyer receives the full text after purchase, and sellers keep 100% on sales through their own link or 80% through the marketplace. MCP Market sells skills too, but installs deliver the source.

The economics are honest as long as you read them plainly: you are paid once per buyer, and every buyer ends up holding the method. For a skill whose value is broad but shallow — useful to many, secret to none — a one-time sale prices that correctly, and these marketplaces have the buyers today.

Server-side marketplaces: selling runs, not files

The newer group executes the skill on the platform's servers and pays the author per run, so the file is never the thing delivered. Betterprompt does this for prompts — the buyer gets results, the author earns per run — but for prompts only, not agent skills. Capafy runs skills in a server-side sandbox with an 80/20 split and per-run payment; its caveats are the $0.99 certification fee and the Download mode described under the table above.

Sealed is the same structural bet, applied to agent skills end to end. Hosted skills take inputs and return outputs; Connected skills work on files in the buyer's project under a scope the buyer approves. In both cases the body never reaches the buyer's machine: it is encrypted at rest, decrypted only to execute, and outputs are leak-scanned before they return. The split is 80/20 on every settled call, exact to the micro-dollar — a $0.10 call pays the seller $0.08, and a $0.14 call pays $0.112. Earnings accrue to your Sealed balance from the first settled call. Eligible cash-outs run through a Stripe-hosted Connect account in your name; Stripe does the identity checks and moves funds.

One boundary stated plainly, because it applies to this whole group: the skill has to run somewhere. On Sealed, running it means the body is sent to our model provider, Anthropic, as that run's system prompt. It is never sent to the buyer — that is the claim, and it is the whole claim.

Which should you pick?

It depends on which of three things you're actually selling. Selling reputation? Use the free catalogs — nothing else approaches their reach, and charging for the work you'd rather have cited is bad strategy. Selling a document — a skill whose whole value is text the buyer could read once and keep? A file marketplace prices that correctly as a one-time sale, and no execution model can protect it, because the output is the product. Selling a method — judgment, ordering, edge-case handling that stays valuable across thousands of runs? Server-side execution is the only model where the method survives the first sale, and Sealed and Capafy are the marketplaces built on it.

And Sealed's own limits, since the point of this page is honesty: we are early. The catalog today is fifteen skills we built and run ourselves while the first outside sellers are recruited, so there is no installed audience to borrow, and per-call revenue starts at zero buyers. Sealing also stops the file being copied, not the idea being studied — someone can run your skill twenty times and approximate the approach. The doing-vs-dispensing test will tell you whether what you're holding is protectable at all.

Sell the skill. Keep the secret.

If the method is the product, read the seller deal — 80% of every settled call, published and uniform — then follow the publish walkthrough: Hosted skills are self-serve from sign-in to live listing. Still weighing the copy risk itself? Start with how to sell prompts without them getting copied.

Building in the open · @sealedrun