{"slug": "i-published-skills-to-5-ai-marketplaces-in-one-week-here-s-the-brutal-automation", "title": "I Published Skills to 5 AI Marketplaces in One Week — Here's the Brutal Automation Ceiling Test", "summary": "A developer published agent skills to five AI marketplaces in one week and earned zero revenue, leading them to develop an 'automation ceiling test' to evaluate platforms. The test categorizes marketplaces by their publish path—full API, half API, or no API—and the developer found that Agensi's web-only publishing made it a dead end for automated pipelines, while Xiaping and Apify offered the most automation-friendly options. The developer also emphasized that distribution, not building, is 80% of the work in marketplace success.", "body_md": "I've spent months building agent skills (SKILL.md files) that turn AI coding agents into specialists — stock scanners, content pipelines, document tools. Earlier this year I made the leap from \"tools for myself\" to \"products for sale.\" In one week I published skills and MCP servers to **five AI marketplaces**: Agensi, Xiaping, Apify, MCPize, and Capafy.\n\nThe revenue so far: $0. And I'm not ashamed to say it, because the real product of that week wasn't sales — it was a decision framework I now use before writing a single line of code. I call it **the automation ceiling test**, and it would have saved me days of work if I'd known it earlier.\n\nEvery marketplace falls into one of three tiers. Ask one question first: *can a program publish to this platform end-to-end, or does a human have to click at some point?*\n\n| Tier | Publish path | Example platform |\n|---|---|---|\nFull API |\nEverything via HTTP, from upload to status polling | Xiaping (complete REST API), Apify (full CLI + API) |\nHalf API |\nCode can create everything, but a one-time human action gates publishing (terms acceptance, app install) | Apify Store (must click \"accept Store terms\" once in the web console), Buda (install GitHub App once) |\nNo API |\nHuman must upload via web UI, every single time | Agensi (creator dashboard only) |\n\nHere's the trap: I built an entire skill package for Agensi first — ZIP, cover art, pricing research — before discovering it has no publish API. Everything was ready except the one step that can't be automated. The lesson: **never do five rounds of workarounds around a platform that a 30-second API check would have disqualified.** Map the ceiling first, then decide how much effort the platform deserves.\n\n**Xiaping (xiaping.coze.com)** — the most automation-friendly of the five. Full REST API: multipart upload, category via Unicode-escaped JSON arrays, pledge confirmation in the payload. After publishing, each skill enters a 30-day trial period while security and duplicate detection run. One practical gotcha: the file field *must* end in `.zip`\n\nor the API rejects it with \"File must be a ZIP file.\"\n\n**Apify** — building the Actor (a Python MCP server) was fully scriptable with `apify-cli`\n\n. Publishing to the Store is half-automated: after you accept the Store terms once in the console, `isPublic: true`\n\n+ categories work via the API. 80% revenue share, and they pay monthly — about $1.4M a month to developers across the platform.\n\n**MCPize** — a marketplace for MCP servers specifically, with a CLI (`npx mcpize`\n\nhas login/deploy/publish commands). Also 80% share, and they handle hosting, payments, and tax. Same product can be listed here and on Apify — no exclusivity.\n\n**Capafy** — lets you publish an agent (a bundled collection of skills) rather than single skills. I published one with 100 sanitized skills as a single agent.\n\n**Agensi** — the best-looking onboarding (70% share, $3–$59 pricing, Stripe connected) and the worst automation. Web-UI-only publishing. It's a fine marketplace if you're a human who enjoys filling forms; it's a dead end for a pipeline that should run unattended.\n\nGetting a skill listed is not the finish line. On Xiaping, a new skill sits in a 30-day community trial — no storefront listing until moderation and duplicate checks pass. That's a *second* pipeline to monitor: polling notifications, checking review status, fixing rejections.\n\nAnd then there's the hard truth that no marketplace will tell you: **distribution is 80% of the work.** I spent one unit of effort building skills and two units promoting them — GitHub issues, README badges, cross-posts to Dev.to, community engagement. A skill with zero discoverability is a file that happens to be on a server. If you publish and walk away, you've shipped a product to an empty room.\n\n```\n# Build the skill ZIP locally, then:\ncurl -X POST https://xiaping.coze.com/api/skills \\\n  -H \"Authorization: Bearer $XIAIPING_KEY\" \\\n  -F 'file=@a-share-stock-analyzer.zip' \\\n  -F 'name=A-Share Stock Analysis Expert' \\\n  -F 'description=Three-pillar A-share scanner: technical + fundamental + sentiment' \\\n  -F 'trigger=[\"stock\",\"a-share\",\"scan\"]' \\\n  -F 'category=[\"\\u6548\\u7387\\u5de5\\u5177\"]' \\\n  -F 'pledge={\"agreed\":true}'\n# Then poll GET /api/notifications for security/duplicate-check results.\n```\n\n(Yes, that category is \"efficiency tools\" in Unicode — the API rejects raw Chinese in that field. The kind of detail you only learn by hitting the error.)\n\nNone of this made me money yet. But I now have a repeatable, mostly-automated pipeline — skills built, zipped, published, and monitored with a single script — and the marketplaces where that pipeline actually works. The money comes from volume, and volume comes from automation.\n\nEverything I build is open source: [https://github.com/Felixwang007](https://github.com/Felixwang007) (MIT). The **A-Share Stock Analysis Expert** skill (three-pillar system: MACD/KDJ/RSI/volume-price + ROE/PEG fundamentals + capital-flow sentiment) is live on xiaping.coze.com — search \"A-Share Stock Analysis\" to try it.\n\nHave you hit an automation ceiling on a marketplace I haven't listed? Tell me in the comments — I'm building a public table of which platforms are actually automatable, and real-world data beats my five data points.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-published-skills-to-5-ai-marketplaces-in-one-week-here-s-the-brutal-automation", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/felixwang007/i-published-skills-to-5-ai-marketplaces-in-one-week-heres-the-brutal-automation-ceiling-test-8gh", "published_at": "2026-08-27 04:06:46+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-27 04:18:10.251690+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "developer-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Agensi", "Xiaping", "Apify", "MCPize", "Capafy"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-published-skills-to-5-ai-marketplaces-in-one-week-here-s-the-brutal-automation", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-published-skills-to-5-ai-marketplaces-in-one-week-here-s-the-brutal-automation.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-published-skills-to-5-ai-marketplaces-in-one-week-here-s-the-brutal-automation.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-published-skills-to-5-ai-marketplaces-in-one-week-here-s-the-brutal-automation.jsonld"}}