Will there be a future where AI agent skills, such as Skill.md-style workflows, are bought and sold?
Recently, I’ve been building a marketplace called agentskill-shelf for workflow assets like SKILL.md. I’ve been running it for about a month, but so far, no one has posted anything.
That made me think about a more fundamental question:
Are “AI agent skills” really something people will buy and sell?
For example, specialized knowledge and workflows in areas like:
UI/UX
security
DevOps
technical writing
data analysis
might be possible to package as skills.
If so, people who are not specialists in those areas may be able to combine those skills with AI coding tools like Cursor and borrow some of that expertise while building software.
On the other hand, since skills are just files that can be copied, there may be a view that a paid market would be difficult to sustain.
But personally, I think there may still be room for a market based on:
trust
quality
updates
confidence in the creator
This feels similar to books, paid articles, templates, and educational materials. Those can also be copied, but legitimate markets still exist.
What do you think?
Do you think a paid marketplace for AI agent skills can exist?
Or will this remain a niche market limited to certain specialized fields?
It’s common to all new markets. You have to try to attract “buyers” and “sellers” in appropriate proportions.
In the case of purely digital items, the “appropriate proportions” bit of the requirement kind of goes away - because something like a skill is copyable, once it’s listed, many people can “buy” it.
So your issue resolves to finding both suppliers and customers.
The obvious place to start is by seeding the skills available by (getting an AI to) write a few.
And that sentence shows the problem. A skill that can be written by an AI is hard to justify a price for.
So the question becomes how the marketplace itself adds value - either in curation or rating. And to do that, you need to demonstrate that you can add more value than, say, the various GitHub repos of useful skills (curation) and the number of stars they have (rating.)
It strikes me that the skills that people would be more willing to pay for have four characteristics:
1: Complexity - Multi-step agentic workflows with API calls, not simple prompts
2: Currency - Regularly updated for new software versions, not “write once, hope they keep buying”
3: Validated - Peer-reviewed or “Verified Expert” badges, not “anon”
4: Hard to duplicate - Integrated into a proprietary platform/UI, not plain text files shareable on social media.
Until now, I had been thinking of the value of agentskill-shelf mainly as a place where people can sell individual Skill.md files or workflow assets.
But after reading your comment, I realized that if the marketplace is only a place to sell Skill files, the value proposition is probably weak. Skill.md files are text files, so they can be copied, generated by AI, or shared through GitHub, Gists, blogs, or social media.
In that sense, the more important value may not be the Skill file itself, but the trust, curation, validation, maintenance signals, and discoverability that the marketplace provides.
I had not completely ignored this aspect. For example, agentskill-shelf does not allow anonymous posting. Creators are required to register a profile before publishing. This is partly to reduce low-quality or malicious submissions.
I am also designing the platform so that users can see update history and judge whether a Skill is being actively maintained. AI tools and development environments change quickly, so I think Skills should not be treated as “write once and forget” assets. They need to keep being updated.
For validation, I am also currently improving the way I inspect and review the contents of SKILL.md files.
On the other hand, I am still unsure about the “hard to duplicate” part.
If Skills are deeply integrated into a proprietary UI or something like MCP, they may indeed become harder to copy. But at the same time, that could reduce portability. Users may find it harder to combine those Skills with their existing Skills, and the trigger conditions or behavior may differ between the creator’s environment and the buyer’s environment.
For that reason, I am currently prioritizing a portable format like Skill.md.
So maybe the differentiation should not be “this file cannot be copied,” but rather “the trust layer around this file cannot be easily copied.”
For example:
creator profiles
update history
verified status
supported tools and compatibility information
usage examples
reviews from actual users
category-level curation
security and risk checks
expert or verified creator badges
That said, I do not want to close the discussion here. I would actually like to understand what really matters from the perspective of Cursor users.
What conditions would make you trust an AI agent skill enough to use it, or possibly even pay for it?
For example, which of these would matter most?
Expert or verified creator identity
Reviews and usage stats
Update history and maintenance status
Usage examples and demos
Security inspection
Clear compatibility with Cursor
Portability across different agent environments
Deep integration with tools like MCP
Also, if there are categories where paid Skills are more likely to work, what do you think they are?
For example, security, DevOps, testing, migration, technical writing, UI/UX, data analysis, or something else?
At this point, I am starting to think that this may not be a market for “paid SKILL.md files,” but rather a market for discovering trusted, maintained, and practical workflow assets.
But I would really like to hear whether that matches how Cursor users would actually use them.
Yes, I think people will buy these. But only if we stop thinking of them as just SKILL.md files. Anyone can generate text, copy prompts, or scrape GitHub. The value is the expert process inside the workflow. A great skill should feel like borrowing the mind of someone who has already done the thing 1,000 times.
So the real market is not for files. It is for trusted, maintained, expert workflows. The marketplace has to answer: who made this, why should I trust them, have they actually done the work, is it maintained, and does it encode real judgment? I wrote about this idea here: https://www.thetexashacker.com/blog/theres-a-skill-for-that/ and I think The Vibe Marketer points in this direction too. The winning marketplace will not be a prompt marketplace with a new file extension. It will be a marketplace for packaged expertise.
I also think the value is not the SKILL.md file itself, but the expert process embedded inside it. Anyone can generate text or copy prompts, so what really matters is how well the skill captures the judgment of someone who has actually done the work many times.
Reading your article made this idea clearer for me. Skills feel less like a new prompt format and more like a way to package execution. Research, outreach, design review, GTM planning, video composition, and so on — they make the actual way of doing the work reusable. That is why curation, trust, maintenance, and creator credibility seem so important for a marketplace.
One thing I am still thinking about is the supply side. Why do you think people with real expertise would not submit these kinds of skills? Is it because there are not enough buyers yet? Or is it because turning tacit knowledge into a reliable workflow is harder than it looks?
I agree that the winning marketplace will not be a prompt marketplace with a new file extension, but a marketplace for packaged expertise. With that in mind, I would be curious to hear what you think the biggest challenge is: demand, trust, or getting credible creators to contribute in the first place?
I would wonder about the supply side and pricing to make it valuable enough for valuable creators to take the time to publish their skills.I wonder about the demand to make it worth their time. But then again people publish to platforms like Udemy and see it valuable.
Trust is a big thing I think for Skills. For example I have installed an Azure skill - I would never trust a version that is not from Microsoft themselves.
Thank you. I think this is exactly one of the hardest parts: the supply side.
If demand is not visible yet, it is difficult for credible creators to justify spending time publishing high-quality skills. A valuable skill is not just a prompt or a text file. It should contain someone’s practical experience, judgment, checklists, failure patterns, and repeatable process. That takes real effort to package well.
At the same time, I think the Udemy comparison is useful. People do not always publish only because of immediate direct revenue. They also publish to build trust, reputation, proof of expertise, leads, and long-term audience.
So for SkillShelf, I am starting to think the value for creators cannot be only “sell a SKILL.md file.” The platform probably needs to help creators build credibility around their expertise.
For example:
creator profile and reputation
usage stats and reviews
visible maintenance history
proof that the skill is actually practical
a path to consulting, freelance work, or enterprise demand
possibly subscriptions or paid maintenance, not only one-time sales
Pricing is also interesting. If people see it as just a text file, the price ceiling is probably low. But if they see it as a packaged expert workflow that saves hours or prevents mistakes, it becomes closer to templates, technical courses, internal playbooks, or lightweight consulting assets.
My current guess is that the first challenge is not building a huge open marketplace immediately, but showing a few strong examples of what a truly valuable AI agent skill looks like. If those examples create demand, then credible creators may have a stronger reason to contribute.
Thank you. I think this is a very important point.
For categories like cloud, infrastructure, security, authentication, billing, and deployment, the creator identity matters a lot. I would probably feel the same way about an Azure skill. If it is not from Microsoft, or from someone with very strong and visible credibility in that ecosystem, I would be very careful about trusting it.
This also makes me think that a skills marketplace should not use the same trust model for every category.
For example, for UI review or writing workflows, reviews, examples, and usage stats may be enough to evaluate a skill. But for Azure, AWS, DevOps, security, database migration, or production infrastructure, the trust requirements are much higher.
In those categories, the marketplace may need things like:
official publisher status
verified creator identity
clear compatibility information
tool and version support
maintenance history
security review
risk labels for dangerous operations
clear distinction between official, verified, community, and experimental skills
So I agree that trust is not just a nice-to-have. In some categories, it is probably the core product.
This also suggests that the market may not grow evenly across all types of skills. Some low-risk workflow skills may be adopted earlier, while high-risk infrastructure or security skills may require official vendors, verified experts, or a much stronger validation layer before people trust them.
That is very useful for how I should think about SkillShelf. It may not be enough to list skills. The platform needs to make the trust level of each skill visible.
Today, I received some pretty painful feedback about an Agent Skills marketplace.
I reached out to a creator and suggested listing their skills on SkillShelf.
They asked me:
“What advantage does this have over just selling it directly myself?”
I tried to explain the value as I saw it: external discovery, third-party credibility, not being buried under low-quality AI-generated skills, update history, creator ranks, Founding Author status, and so on.
But in the end, it did not resonate. Due to my lack of consideration in how I approached it, I was eventually blocked.
Honestly, it was quite a shock.
This person was one of the creators I had been learning from a lot around Agent Skills, so it hit me pretty hard mentally.
But setting emotions aside, I think this is a very important question.
For someone who already has trust and a sales channel through YouTube, X, note, and so on, what is the real reason to list on a marketplace?
Simply saying “you can sell here” is weak.
Even saying “we will do SEO,” “we will give you a badge,” or “we will show update history” may still not be enough.
Maybe what is really needed is not to talk about creator-side benefits first, but to clarify:
“What kinds of Skills do users actually want?”
“What makes people hesitant to use free Skills scattered across GitHub?”
“What kind of creator would make a Skill trustworthy?”
“Do update history and creator track record actually affect purchase decisions?”
In other words, maybe I should not try to persuade strong creators first.
Maybe I should first gather demand and trust conditions from the user side.
I would like to ask people who create or use Agent Skills:
Under what conditions would you want to list a Skill on a marketplace, or buy one from a marketplace?
And conversely, what kind of marketplace would you absolutely not want to use?