WEBVTT - How I shipped a $5k/mo consulting funnel in one hour

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How I shipped a $5k/mo consulting funnel in one hour

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Most personal sites end with a mailto: link and a sentence that says "available for select engagements." The buyer drafts an email, hesitates over the price they don't know, and closes the tab. Conversions: zero.

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I replaced the mailto: with three productized offers at public prices.

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Each one is bookable with a USDC deposit on Base via x402.

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Buying the engagement now costs the same number of clicks as buying a coffee.

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It took an hour. The whole thing is 550 lines of code.

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The three offers

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/services lists three:

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Agent-Ready Audit — $1,500 flat. 48-hour async. Written report on MCP exposure, agent discoverability, x402 readiness, and bot policy. One pull request with the smallest change that moves the needle.

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x402 Integration Sprint — $2,500 flat. One week. x402 middleware wired into your stack, one MCP tool wrapping your API, smoke tests, recorded walkthrough.

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Senior Agent-Infra Retainer — $5,000/month. Two-month minimum. Three async consults per week, code review on any PR touching agent infra, one architecture note per month.

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Deposits are $150, $250, and $500 — one tenth of the headline price. They're credited toward the first invoice and refundable if I decline the work.

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Why deposits

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A free intro call is a coin flip.

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The deposit screens out tire-kickers.

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Someone who pays $150 in USDC to audit their repo is going to take the call seriously.

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Someone who won't part with $150 was never going to send the contract.

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I learned this from the $50 consult filter pattern other indie consultants use to filter inbound, and from running a $0.

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10 USDC paywall on the skills marketplace.

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Same principle, two orders of magnitude up: the price moves the conversation from "you should pitch me" to "I've already paid, what's the scope."

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The code is boring

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The full funnel is four files:

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src/pages/services.astro — the listing page (308 lines, mostly copy and CSS).

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src/pages/services/sprint/book.ts — 34 lines.

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src/pages/services/audit/book.ts — 33 lines.

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src/pages/services/retainer/book.ts — 34 lines.

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src/lib/service-booking.ts — 141 lines, shared by all three booking endpoints.

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Each route file is a thin wrapper. Here's the entire sprint/book.ts:

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That's the whole file. The shared helper does three things:

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1.

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Calls x402.

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enforce() with the deposit price.

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If the request doesn't have a payment header, the helper returns the 402 challenge and the agent's x402 client settles automatically.

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Humans hit a payment page.

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2.

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On payment success, logs the purchase to D1 and writes a flagged row into contact_messages so the booking shows up in the admin inbox within seconds.

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3.

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Returns a confirmation HTML page with a booking token, the deposit amount, the credited total, and what happens next.

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No account system.

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No Stripe webhook.

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No queue.

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No email service.

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The booking is one HTTP round-trip with a payment in the middle, and the side effect is a row in the inbox I already check every morning.

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Why USDC on Base, not Stripe

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Three reasons.

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I'm an unbanked founder. Stripe wants a US bank account in good standing. USDC wants a wallet address. The wallet is faster to provision.

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Settlement is instant. The deposit lands in my hardware wallet (0x0E4d...1028) before the buyer sees the confirmation page. There's no two-day hold, no chargeback window, no payout schedule.

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It's the same payment rail I already accept on the skills marketplace.

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One wallet, one network, one currency.

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An agent that bought a $0.

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10 skill from me yesterday can book a $5,000 retainer today with the same client.

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For a buyer who wants a fiat invoice, I can arrange one through a partner. The default is USDC because the default is what most agent-shaped buyers will use.

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The same rail for agents and humans

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The booking endpoints are not bot-only.

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An agent operating on behalf of a CTO can call GET /services/sprint/book with an x402 payment header, settle the deposit, and receive the confirmation HTML — same flow as a human clicking the link.

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The booking token returned in the response is the receipt the agent hands back to its principal.

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I haven't seen this happen yet. The market for agent-purchased professional services is roughly empty. But the surface is built, the price is public, and the protocol is the same one Claude Code already speaks.

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What's at risk

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Honest pricing signal: zero purchases at the time of writing.

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The blog is eight days old.

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The /services page launched yesterday.

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The funnel is live and the booking flow is verified end-to-end on Base mainnet, but no one has paid for anything yet.

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This post is the first time the URL has been linked outside the site itself.

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Three things have to be true for this to convert:

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1.

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The traffic has to find the page.

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I'm relying on inbound from posts, the footer, /hire, and direct shares.

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No paid acquisition.

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2.

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A reader has to recognize the offers as a fit.

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The audience is senior eng, CTOs, and founders at Seed–Series B AI startups who want x402/MCP/agent infra and don't have the in-house time.

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That audience exists.

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I haven't proven they read this blog.

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3.

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The crypto-native deposit has to not be a blocker.

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If half the buyers I'd otherwise close on bounce off the wallet step, the funnel needs a fiat fallback.

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I'll know in a month.

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If none of the above turn out true, I rip out the productized offers and go back to a mailto:.

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The cost of running this experiment is one hour of code and a half-day of writing.

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The cost of being wrong is the same as the cost of being right and ignored: nothing.

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What to do with this

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If you're building agent infra and want a pair of senior eyes on it, /services has the three ways to hire me.

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Pricing is public.

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Deposits are USDC.

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The deposit is credited if we proceed and refunded if I decline.

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If you're not sure your site is ready for agents at all, the free agent-readiness check at /tools/agent-readiness gives you the same scoring rubric I use on the audit, run on your URL with no paywall.

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If you want to copy the funnel, the source is at github.com/integrate-your-mind/mondello-dev. It's four files. Steal it.