From Vibe Coding to Skills and Agents, AI is opening a new window for entrepreneurship: a single person can build an app, and a single skill can become a product. As the barriers to creation and development fall, 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 teamed up with Guancha to launch the "PAYATHON 2026" annual hackathon, inviting developers to compete with apps, Skills, or Agents: integrate payments, push their ideas into the real market, and compete for a total prize pool of 200,000 yuan. Registration closes on December 1, and the offline finals will be held on December 26.
This hackathon is not only about creativity and technology, but even more about a product's value in real transactions. It is also a key initiative in Alipay AI Payment's "developers first" product strategy: by continuously lowering the commercialization barrier for AI products, developers worry less about collection, delivery, and pricing, so good projects turn into good businesses faster.
Five tracks to bring works 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 tracks: two main tracks—App and Skill—centered on Vibe Pay and Skill Pay; and around Token Pay, Machine Pay, and Agent Pay, focusing on exploring pay-per-use, continuous subscriptions, and transaction scenarios between machines and agents.
The competition assesses not only product completeness and technical implementation, but also lists "commercial performance" and "real user payments" as key judging criteria, letting participants test in practice: is the product useful, 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 account settlement. This hackathon hopes to connect technical creation with business practice, letting developers enter with real integration and operational questions, and find possibilities for their products' sustainable growth.
The first orders are happening
Can AI products actually be sold? Within the Alipay AI Payment ecosystem, a group of early-mover developers have already given an answer:
Self-media blogger Woniu and his team turned workflows for topic selection, scripts, and cover creation into "Blogger Farm," attracting more than 1,000 registered users and over 300 bloggers, yet had no paying users for a long time.
To give the product payment collection capability, the team tried many approaches and struggled for 159 days. Until they discovered "Aichashou," launched by Alipay AI Pay together with Guancha, the team reached a turning point: they got a guide "written for AI to read," had Codex write the code, completed integration and went live in 73 minutes, and quickly received 10 orders, with points automatically credited without any manual handling.
Behind zero payments there was also a cumbersome payment threshold. Crossing that threshold, Woniu 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 happened in other products too. The image-and-text generation tool "Redink" received 9 orders with transaction amounts exceeding 1,282 yuan; developer Canghe explored pricing mechanisms around products such as CodexGuide and GPT-Image2, 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 demand, try charging, and strive for your first order. In this wave of AI entrepreneurship, let your idea take the first step toward becoming a business.
This article was provided by Ant, reprinted by QbitAI with authorization; the views belong to the original author.