From Vibe Coding to Skill, Agent, AI is opening a new round of entrepreneurial window: one person can build an app, and a skill can also become a product. As the barriers to creation and development lower, new opportunities are emerging—making the AI product you build into a business that users are willing to pay for.
Facing this wave, on October 24, Alipay AI Payment joined forces with Guancha to launch the "PAYATHON 2026" annual hackathon, inviting developers to compete with their apps, Skills, or Agents: integrate payments, push ideas into the real market, and compete for a total prize pool of RMB 200,000. Registration closes on December 1, and the offline finals will be held on December 26.
This hackathon measures not only creativity and technology, but also the value of a product in real transactions. It is also a key initiative of Alipay AI Payment's "developers first" product strategy: by continuously lowering the commercialization barriers for AI products, developers worry less about collection, delivery, and pricing, and good projects become good businesses faster.
Five major tracks to bring your work to market
A standalone app or an Agent skill can both be a starting point for entry. This competition is open to individual developers and teams, with five major tracks: apps and skills as the two main tracks, centered on Vibe Pay and Skill Pay; and around Token Pay, Machine Pay, and Agent Pay, it focuses on exploring pay-per-use, continuous subscriptions, and transaction scenarios between machines and agents.
The competition not only assesses the completeness of product features and technical implementation, but also lists "commercial performance" and "real user payments" as key evaluation criteria, letting participants test in real-world practice: is the product easy to use, and are users willing to pay?
From "building it" to "selling it," developers need more than code generation tools—they need a complete set of support that links pricing strategy, payment fulfillment, and accounting settlement. This hackathon aims to connect technical creation with business practice, letting developers compete with real integration and operational questions, and find possibilities for sustainable growth for their products.
The first orders are happening
Can AI products actually be sold? Within the Alipay AI Payment ecosystem, a group of pioneering developers have already given the answer:
Self-media blogger Woniu and his team turned workflows such as topic selection, scripts, and cover creation into "Blogger Farm," attracting more than 1000 registered users and over 300 bloggers, but had no paying users for a long time.
To give the product payment capabilities, the team tried many approaches and struggled for 159 days. Then they discovered "Aichashou," launched by Alipay AI Pay together with Guancha, and the team reached a turning point: they obtained the "written for AI to read" guide, handed it to Codex to write the code, completed the integration and went live in 73 minutes, and quickly received 10 orders, with credits arriving automatically and no manual handling needed.
Behind zero payments, there was also a cumbersome payment barrier. Crossing that barrier, Woniu also saw another possibility of turning his work experience into a product. He said: "Bloggers have a life cycle and may fade after three to five years. But the product can generate income even while I sleep.
" Similar attempts have occurred in other products as well. The image-and-text generation tool "Redink" received 9 orders, with transaction volume exceeding RMB 1282; developer Canghe explored monetization mechanisms around CodexGuide, GPT-Image2, and other products, accumulating more than 500 real orders.
These attempts make the new round of entrepreneurial opportunity concrete, and they are also the invitation issued by this hackathon: bring the project you are developing, validate the demand, try charging, and strive for your first order. In this wave of AI entrepreneurship, let your creativity take the first step toward a business.