Knowledge base · foundations
Machine-Native Goods
The types of digital goods and services that agents consume in the headless economy, and the access models through which they are provisioned.
What agents consume
The headless economy includes a wide range of goods consumed by software rather than navigated by humans.
Capabilities and tools
- APIs
- CLI tools
- SDKs
- MCP-accessible capabilities
- Workflow primitives
Data and knowledge
- Datasets
- Search and retrieval endpoints
- Content
- Documents
- Facts
- Structured knowledge
Infrastructure
- Model inference
- Ranking and classification services
- Authentication and identity services
- Memory and state services
- Storage and hosting
- Observability and monitoring
- Compute
Commerce
- Payment and settlement rails
Access models
Machine-native goods may be accessed through:
- Free access — no cost, no authentication
- Open source — freely available code and tools
- Public web access — publicly available data and content
- Freemium — basic access free, premium features paid
- Quota-based usage — limited free tier, paid beyond limits
- Subscription — recurring payment for access
- Per-call pricing — pay per API invocation
- Per-task pricing — pay per completed task
- Per-result pricing — pay per successful outcome
- Enterprise provisioning — negotiated access and SLAs
- Internal/private deployment — self-hosted or on-premise
- Sponsored or subsidized access — third-party funded
- Protocol-mediated settlement — programmatic payment rails