Monid founder Shengkun Ye (@shengkun_ye) on July 20th launched pay-per-use access to public social media data, giving AI agents a single interface for reading posts, comments, profiles and engagement signals across major platforms without connecting a user's social accounts.
The San Francisco-based service covers X, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, WeChat and RedNote, according to Monid's launch page. Amazon product data and other web services are available through Monid's wider catalog.
Ye previously led payments risk products at TabaPay, according to his personal site, where he says he built a real-time monitoring product for payment fraud. That background carries directly into Monid's architecture: the product treats API access as a metered transaction that an agent can discover, price and execute from one funded balance.
Ye introduced the social data service in an eight-post thread on X, claiming Monid had "killed Apify" by removing monthly subscriptions and charging from $0.0015 per request. The comparison overstates the divide between the products and understates the variation in Monid's own rates.
Monid's published social-data prices depend on the platform and the unit returned. Its launch page lists TikTok posts at $0.00045 each, X posts at $0.0006 each, Instagram post requests at $0.00225, Reddit results at $0.0057 and LinkedIn profile posts at $0.009. Facebook comments cost $0.003 each and YouTube comments cost $0.00225. Monid says agents receive the exact quote before a run.
Apify's pricing page lists a free tier with $5 in monthly usage, a $29 Starter plan and a $199 Scale plan. The $199 figure cited by Ye is therefore one tier rather than Apify's entry price. Apify also lets customers continue beyond the included usage on a pay-as-you-go basis, while individual tools in its marketplace can use their own metered pricing.
Monid is an aggregation layer, including for Apify
Monid's sharper pitch is consolidation. Its homepage says the catalog contains more than 1,300 tools across at least 13 providers. An agent can search the registry, compare candidates by fit and price, inspect an endpoint's schema and then execute a call without opening a separate vendor account for each service.
That makes Monid closer to the "openrouter for APIs," as Ye described it in the thread, than a direct replacement for every data provider underneath it. Monid's own pricing documentation uses an Apify tweet-scraping endpoint as its example for inspecting a provider's price. Monid's homepage also lists Apify alongside Browserbase, Exa, Apollo and People Data Labs as tools available through the service.
Monid is therefore competing with Apify at the billing, discovery and developer-interface layers while potentially sending some requests to Apify infrastructure. The product's value depends on whether one wallet and one agent-facing registry are easier to operate than maintaining separate API keys, subscriptions and integrations.
Monid's documentation offers four connection methods: a remote Model Context Protocol server, an agent skill, a command-line interface and an HTTP API. The service supports per-call pricing and per-result pricing, including endpoints that combine a base execution fee with a charge for each returned item.
Ye and co-founder Feiyou Guo described the original product as a wallet for agents when Monid launched earlier in 2026. At that point, Monid advertised more than 215 endpoints. The current claim of 1,300 tools suggests a rapid expansion of the registry, though Monid has not published usage, revenue or reliability figures that would show how much of that catalog is active in production.
The social data release gives Monid a concrete use case for its broader agent-commerce thesis. Research agents frequently need information distributed across platforms that impose different authentication systems, rate limits and pricing structures. Monid is betting that those agents should choose and purchase the required data during a task, rather than forcing developers to predict every source in advance and maintain a permanent subscription for each one.