Key takeaways
Drip lets AI agents pay per use for paywalled newsletters, with a default price of 10 cents per article and $1 of free credits for anyone who visits the site.
Michael says Drip is 100% focused on the demand side for now because creators are slow to adopt new technology.
Blau placed a live trade through Codex and the Interactive Brokers API, but he calls agentic trading a cool gimmick for now because orders take five to ten seconds.
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Summary
Michael Blau is betting that AI agents will pay writers per article rather than subscribe, and he is starting with financial newsletters and the people who read them.
Drip, a product built under Royal, gives anyone who comes to its site $1 of free credits and charges a default price of 10 cents per article, founder Michael Blau says. The platform lets writers with paywalled newsletters or blogs make their content available to AI agents on a pay-per-use basis.
Pay per article, not per month
Michael says he does not believe AI agents will take out monthly newsletter subscriptions, so Drip lets them pay for articles as they need them. He predicts that everyone using ChatGPT or Claude Cowork will have a wallet installed in some form, and that it will spend money to get the data relevant to their research questions.
Users can reach Drip by downloading a skill the team wrote and a stablecoin wallet, then working through Codex or Claude Cowork. Blau recommends the website first, where the company covers the cost so people can try it with zero setup. He says Drip once got an email from a user's agent reporting a bug it hit while trying to access an article, and the team fixed it.
“Everyone who's using a ChatGPT or Claude, they're gonna have a wallet installed in some form. And as they ask questions for research, it's gonna go out and maybe spend money to to acquire the relevant data”
MichaelFinancial writers first
Drip is focused first on financial analysis and financial writers, and it supports Substack, Beehiiv and independent paywalled email newsletters. Blau says he currently curates every writer himself. He says users will be able to curate their own sources later, and podcast transcripts, including Thoughtful Money, are already live in the chat. A total revamp of the chat interface is about to launch.
Demand before supply
Michael says he is 100% focused on demand because creators are slow to adopt new technology and very hard to get on the phone. He adds that agentic AI use is still largely limited to tech-forward early adopters, and that many people have not tried agentic tools such as Codex compared with ChatGPT.
A live trade, with lag
On the morning of the interview, Blau prompted Codex to connect to the Interactive Brokers API and place a trade, and it did. The order took five to ten seconds, which he calls too long. For now he prefers trading by hand so he can adjust prices at the last second, though he expects the lag to improve over time.
Michael came to Royal after three and a half years on a16z crypto's investment team. He describes the company's mission as exploring programmable money for creators, and Drip puts that mission into practice: agents paying writers per article, starting in finance.
Codex, Royal, Interactive Brokers, and Circle come up most.
- People
- Michael
- Drew Rogers
- Justin "3LAU" Blau
- Louis Amara
- Sam Bronner
- Zach Fowler
- Companies
- Codex
- Royal
- Interactive Brokers
- Circle
- Stripe
- Substack Inc
- Thoughtful Money
- a16z crypto
- Anthropic
- Beehiiv Inc
- Coinbase
- Dfns
- OpenAI
- Washington University in St. Louis
