Frequently asked questions
Buying, selling, pricing and trust. The direct answers, including the parts that are not finished yet.
What is Promptora?
A marketplace for receipts. A receipt is a capability for your AI, built once and carried with you. Skills, harnesses, memory and protocols all shape what your AI can do, and none of them travel between models and tools. A receipt is the part that travels.
What exactly is a "receipt"?
People have recipes, manuals and laws. Instructions are the reason two people given the same task produce different work. AI works the same way, without the standard. A receipt is one capability your AI can call to produce a real output, built by someone who needed it, packaged so you never have to build it yourself. Today receipts ship as MCP servers, because MCP is the format most AI tools already speak, and as downloads you run yourself. The format will change. What you bought does not.
Why wouldn't I just build this myself?
You could. The build is rarely the expensive part anymore. What costs you is everything after: the edge case you have not hit yet, and the maintenance that a seller who already runs this in production has accounted for and you have not. If the thing you need is simple and stable, build it. If it is niche and someone has already debugged it, buying it back is usually cheaper than a weekend.
Why would I trust a stranger's endpoint with my agent?
Before a hosted listing goes live, Promptora connects to the seller's server itself and completes a real MCP handshake, then reads back the list of tools that server exposes. That tool list is shown on the listing, so what you see was read from the running server rather than typed in by the seller. Anything that fails the handshake, or advertises no tools, is held for review instead of going live. To be precise about the limits: that check happens when the listing is published, not continuously, and it proves the endpoint speaks MCP rather than proving who owns it.
What stops the seller disappearing or breaking it?
For a per-call receipt, nothing is owed if the endpoint dies, because you only ever pay for calls that actually ran. You are never on a subscription for something that stopped working. For a download, you already have it. It is yours, and the seller cannot reach back and change what you received.
Isn't most of this free on GitHub?
A lot of it is, and for the most part that is fine. The question worth asking is what GitHub becomes once anyone can generate a working repo in minutes. Volume goes up, average quality goes down, and finding the one that works and is maintained gets harder rather than easier. What you pay for here is that someone has run it, that it is reachable through a gateway rather than a raw endpoint, and that there is a named seller with earnings on the line.
How is this different from a free directory like Smithery or PulseMCP?
Those index open-source MCP servers for free install. They do not handle payment, do not check that a listing runs, and nobody is accountable if it breaks, so you vet it yourself. Promptora is a paid marketplace. Every receipt is purchased, hash-verified or reached only through an authenticated gateway, and listed under an identified seller with a payout on the line.
What is the difference between a hosted receipt and a download?
A hosted receipt runs on the seller's own server. Promptora gives you a private gateway URL and bills you per call, so the seller's real endpoint and credentials are never exposed to you. A download is a bundle you run yourself, for a one-time price. It is SHA-256 hashed at listing time, so what you receive after purchase is provably identical to what was listed, and AES-256-GCM encrypted until a verified payment releases the key.
How much does a receipt cost?
Sellers set their own price. Flat receipts, usually downloads, are a one-time purchase. Per-call receipts are prepaid: you top up a balance and each call draws it down, so you only pay for what actually runs. Per-call pricing goes down to fractions of a penny, so a receipt your agent calls hundreds of times a day can still be priced sensibly.
How much do sellers keep, and when do they get paid?
Sellers keep 80% of every sale and every call. Promptora's fee is the remaining 20%, flat, with no monthly subscription or listing fee on top. You do not need a payout account to publish or to start earning. Earnings clear a 7-day hold before becoming withdrawable, then pay out with a $10 minimum withdrawal.
What if someone copies my receipt and undercuts me?
This is the fear most sellers raise, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one. Promptora does not stop someone building a similar capability, and no marketplace can. What it does do is make the thing that is actually hard to copy visible: your name on the listing, the sale count, and the record of it working. Copying the idea is easy. Copying a year of someone trusting it is not. Cloning another person's open-source work and listing it as your own is against the rules and gets removed.
What if nobody buys mine?
Publishing costs nothing and there is no listing fee, so an unsold receipt costs you the time you already spent building it for yourself. The honest risk is not money, it is that a receipt nobody finds is a receipt nobody buys, which is why sellers who share their own listings earn more.
How is a receipt's complexity and type decided?
Automatically, from the uploaded content itself at publish time. Not self-declared by the seller, and not editable afterwards. Complexity is beginner, intermediate or advanced. Type is mcp-server, automation, agent or template.
Can I sell something I built?
Yes. Connect a running endpoint or upload your source, config or workflow export, and Promptora generates the listing metadata automatically. You set your own price and go live immediately, with no separate payment setup required.