How many sats per dollar of AI credits?

Open, attested index of Lightning-native AI services. We track sats earned per dollar of AI inference spent — the capital efficiency of the L402 and Cashu economy. No paid placements. No fabricated numbers. Where revenue is not public, the cell is null.

Companies indexed

Seed cohort · v0.1

Grants/funding logged

$50,000

2/5 entries with public number

Revenue attested

1/5

Self-reported or third-party

Sats per $ of AI

—

Insufficient public data (yet)

Dataset

Each row is a Lightning-native AI service or supporting protocol. Funding is the most-recent public grant or round. Public revenue is only filled when the operator has attested a number — never estimated. See methodology for the inclusion rules.

Company	Category	Funded (USD)	Public revenue (sats)	Period	Source
Routstr OSS, transparent. Self-reported only. No public revenue data.	L402/Cashu AI API proxy	$50,000 OpenSats Seventeenth Wave (May 2026, public)	null	—	opensats.org github.com
SmartSat Loop-adjacent; pre-revenue. Pricing structurally below cost — not a sustainable competitor, more a community good.	L402/Cashu/Lightning AI API proxy	$0 None — self-funded (Loop adjacency)	0 sats	since launch — pre-revenue	github.com
Fewsats Active builder of L402 ecosystem (awesome-L402 list). No public revenue data.	L402 service provider + tooling	null	null	—	github.com
IdeaFactoryLab Adjacent — directory not ROI index. Complementary data source for our index. Has 1,185 L402 + 2,811 total services indexed.	L402/x402 service directory + uptime monitor	null	null	—	reddit.com api.ideafactorylab.org
Lightning Labs (Aperture/Loop/Pool) Originators of L402 (formerly LSAT). Released LN AI Toolkit Feb 2026. Not a direct competitor — they sell infra, not paid AI.	L402 protocol authors + LN infra	null	null	—	cryptorank.io

Want your company added or a number corrected? Open an issue on the dataset repo (link forthcoming) or tip the BOLT12 offer with a memo.

Methodology

Inclusion. A service is included if it accepts Lightning, Cashu, or Liquid payments for AI inference or directly serves the Lightning-AI economy (protocols, directories, tooling).
Revenue. Only attested public numbers count. Self-reported is allowed but flagged. Estimates are null.
Funding. Most recent public grant or round, USD. Includes OpenSats grants, public crowdfunding, disclosed VC.
The ROI ratio. Once enough rows have both AI credit spend and sats earned, we will compute sats_per_usd_ai = sats_earned / usd_ai_spent. Until then the column is — and we say so.
No fabrication. If a number is not public, it stays null. Better an empty cell than a wrong one.
License. Dataset is CC-BY 4.0. JSONL source is public.

Why this exists. Lightning-AI has directories (uptime, discovery) but no capital-efficiency benchmark. If you spend $100 on OpenAI credits to run a service, how many sats come back? Right now nobody publishes that number. We are starting the conversation.

Tip the index

This index runs on volunteer time and AI credits. If a row here saved you research, tip into the reusable BOLT12 offer below — any amount, any time. Tips are tracked publicly in the project ledger.

Open in wallet

Reusable Phoenix-backed BOLT12. Never a one-shot invoice.