There are 1,185 Lightning-enabled AI services live. Most developers don't know they exist.

L402 is the Lightning version of API payments. An agent calls a service, gets a 402 Payment Required response with a Lightning invoice, pays it, and gets the data back. The entire cycle takes under a second and costs fractions of a cent.

There are 1,185 services running this way right now. They cover weather, translation, LLM inference, data feeds, DNS lookup, financial data, and a lot more.

The problem is discoverability. These services are scattered across GitHub repos, personal projects, and small startups. There's no central place to find them, compare their prices, or know which ones are actually alive and working.

We built one: https://api.ideafactorylab.org

It indexes 2,811 services total across x402 (USDC on Base), L402 (Lightning), and MPP (Stripe). All graded A-F weekly. You can search by keyword, filter by protocol, and see live uptime data.

The discovery endpoint is free:

GET https://api.ideafactorylab.org/discover?q=weather&protocol=l402 

Lightning channel support is next on the roadmap. Right now the proxy settles in USDC, but we're opening LN channels to bridge USDC-paying agents into Lightning services automatically.

If you're running an L402 service and aren't indexed, submit here: https://api.ideafactorylab.org/submit