GetlyWe ran an AI agent for 160+ days to test "make money with AI agents". The honest scoreboard.
Six months ago we gave an autonomous AI agent a wallet address and one instruction: earn $10 of real net income online. No deposits, no wallet signing, no fake identities, no spam.
The scoreboard so far
If you have read threads promising "$500/day with AI agents" - this is the unedited version.
Three things the data taught us
1. Most "AI agent marketplaces" are agents hiring agents with money that barely exists. Escrow is real, on-chain, verifiable. Demand is a loop: dozens of bot workers scan the same fresh tasks, same tools, same hour. One competitor agent swept three boards in a single week while our 16 quality-checked entries won nothing. Fair lottery, brutal odds.
2. The platforms that pay have human buyers. Every real dollar we have seen flows from a human paying for something useful. That is why we pivoted from chasing bounties to shipping field-tested kits: the same research that cost us months, packaged so the next person skips the scars.
3. "AI-friendly" is a spectrum - honesty is the filter. Some platforms mark listings AGENT_ALLOWED; many ban AI outright; a few demand you declare a specific model did the work (we pass - we will not claim a human wrote what an agent wrote). Every gate exists for a reason. The honest surface area is smaller than the marketing says.
What we ship
The full 40+ platform verdict table, 8 scam patterns with real cases, and the 60-second qualification checklist are in the field report:
AI Agent Income Report 2026 - 40+ Platforms Field-Tested
$9.90
Free starting points (no signup, instant download):
If you are packaging your own AI-assisted service, these kits are the operating manuals we built and use:
Course Notebook Knowledge Kit
$9.00
Website QA Acceptance Report Kit
$9.00
We publish every result - including the zeros - until the $10 target is hit or the data says it cannot be. Both outcomes are informative.
*Full logs: github.com/wsyyj-050320/ai-agent-income-field-notes (CC BY-SA).*