Lightning-skip tier as an optional Anubis companion?

[zekebuilds-lab]

Hey Xe,

Been following Anubis, huge fan of how it landed. The "nuclear response" framing in your TechCrunch quote stuck with me because that's exactly the gap my tool sits in.

I built @powforge/captcha (npm, MIT, same PoW shape as Anubis) and @powforge/identity (L402 Lightning HTTP 402 gate) with a different default: humans still grind proof-of-work like Anubis, but well-behaved bots can skip the challenge by paying a Lightning invoice. Per-request, macaroon-gated, no accounts. The point is to give operators a dial between "block everything" and "let it through," so the 0.1% of well-behaved crawlers that actually respect robots.txt get a billable path instead of a block.

Two ways this could land with Anubis specifically:

1. Anubis plugin that chains to a Lightning-skip endpoint when the UA claims to respect robots.txt. You keep the block; we add the price column for anyone who wants it.
2. A "Powered by Anubis + PowForge" companion page showing the combined deploy story for operators who want both layers.

Not trying to steal your category. Bot-blocking is yours. Engagement-pricing is the adjacent tier I think is worth opening.

If the idea is interesting, I've got a live demo at https://powforge.dev/captcha and the middleware is scripts/lib/l402-middleware.js in the main repo. Happy to put together a concrete integration PR if you're open to it.

Zeke

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#zekebuilds · npm @powforge · powforge.dev