Pickaxe
A no-code platform for consultants, coaches, and agencies to build custom AI agents, deploy them across eight channels, and sell them through branded client portals with Stripe billing, access control, and usage tracking built in.
What is Pickaxe?
Pickaxe is a no-code platform for building, deploying, and selling custom AI agents. Pickaxe Inc operates from San Francisco; its original domain, pickaxeproject.com, was first archived on 30 November 2022 and now redirects to pickaxe.co. The company calls itself the “Shopify for agent-powered businesses”, and that framing is accurate: the point is not only to build an agent, but to turn it into a product someone pays for.
An agent, in Pickaxe’s own words, is “an AI tool, either a chatbot or a form, that is powered with a prompt”. You write role instructions in a visual builder, choose a model, attach a knowledge base, and connect actions. The knowledge base accepts 14+ content types — documents, websites, videos, API endpoints — and resyncs daily across the workspace. Model choice is unusually wide: the features page advertises 50+ models, the models page counts 72, drawn from ten providers including OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Z.ai, Moonshot AI, and Xiaomi, switchable in one click.
Deployment covers eight surfaces: portals, standalone pages, a direct link, a web embed in five styles, the API, hosted email, Slack, and WhatsApp, with Telegram and Discord listed in the pricing table. Studios, also called portals, are standalone branded web applications with a custom domain, user accounts, navigation, and billing built in. Monetization runs on Stripe: subscriptions, multiple tiers, per-tool paywalls, and usage budgets.
The economics deserve attention. Usage runs on credits, where one dollar of credit equals one dollar of usage cost, drawn down on every generation, including generations triggered by your agent’s end users. Pickaxe also keeps a share of workspace revenue: 10 percent on Gold, 8 percent on Pro, down to 2 percent on Business.
Developers get a versioned JSON API at api.pickaxe.co/v1 with one key per agent, streaming and non-streaming on the same route, and token usage in every response, plus webhooks, MCP support, and a CLI designed for coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. Built-in generators produce PDFs through OpenClaw’s isolated execution engine, along with Word documents, charts, QR codes, and memes. On compliance, Pickaxe claims SOC 2 examined status, GDPR and CCPA alignment, enterprise SSO, AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS in transit, and a Vanta Trust Center. The site is published in English and Spanish.
What it does
- Build a custom AI agent, chatbot or form, in a visual builder: role instructions, model choice, knowledge base, and actions, with no code required.
- Attach an auto-updating knowledge base covering 14+ content types — websites, PDFs, Google Docs, Notion, videos — resynced daily.
- Deploy the same agent across eight surfaces: portal, page, direct link, web embed, API, email, Slack, and WhatsApp.
- Package several agents into a branded portal with a custom domain, user accounts, and access control.
- Monetize with Stripe: subscriptions, tiers, per-tool paywalls, and per-user usage budgets.
- Connect actions from more than 500 integrations to trigger real-time workflows.
- Track conversations, users, and persistent memories, and drive the whole account from the Pickaxe CLI.
When to use Pickaxe / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Pickaxe is the right fit.
When to use Pickaxe
- Independent consultants, coaches, and trainers who want to package their expertise into an AI tool clients pay for.
- AI agencies, MSPs, and system integrators delivering white-label agents, each client getting its own branded portal, domain, and billing.
- Educators and instructional designers, from K-12 districts to admissions coaching, building tutoring and course-support assistants.
- Non-technical creators and solopreneurs: the builder is visual, and one customer reports doing in half an hour what he expected to hire a Python developer for.
- In-house support, marketing, real estate, insurance, and public-sector teams that need internal assistants deployed on Slack, WhatsApp, or their own website.
When not to use Pickaxe
- Buyers who want to try before paying: the pricing table lists three paid plans only, from USD 37 per month, with no permanent free plan and no advertised free trial.
- Regulated organizations that require a signed DPA, a declared hosting jurisdiction, and an Article 27 EU representative: none of the three is published.
- Teams that need a contractual no-training guarantee by default, since the exclusion only applies to uploaded documents and to Pro-tier members while their subscription lasts.
- Anyone needing self-hosting, on-premise deployment, or a native mobile app: no such option is offered.
- Businesses unwilling to accept a no-refund policy in all circumstances, a six-month minimum term on the Business plan, and a 2 to 10 percent cut of workspace revenue.
How to use Pickaxe
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account on pickaxe.co, or go straight into the builder.
- Describe the agent you want in plain language and let the Automatic AI Builder draft the prompt, or write the role instructions yourself.
- Choose a model from the 72 available, and change it later as cost, speed, or quality dictate.
- Add the knowledge base: documents, websites, and videos, resynced daily without further work.
- Connect actions from the 500+ integrations, or add custom actions and webhooks.
- Test the agent, keeping in mind that every generation draws down credits.
- Publish it as a direct link, or use the add embed button inside a Studio and paste one line of code into Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Notion, Kajabi, WordPress, or Shopify.
- Group your agents into a Studio or portal, set it Public or Invite-Only, and point a custom domain at it with a single DNS record from the Settings tab.
- Turn on monetization through Stripe: set prices and usage quotas, create several tiers, and paywall individual tools.
- On the developer side, generate an API key per agent — cURL, Node, and Python samples are provided at creation — or drive the account from the CLI; the Pickaxe team also scopes and builds agents on request, starting with a 15-minute call.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Building, deploying, and monetizing sit in one product: billing, access control, and usage tracking do not have to be rebuilt around the agent.
- Eight deployment surfaces run on the same prompt, the same knowledge base, and the same memory.
- 72 models from ten providers with one-click switching, and model rates displayed and updated automatically.
- More than 500 integrations through Actions, plus Zapier, Make, and n8n webhooks and custom actions.
- Genuinely usable without a developer, while still exposing an API, a CLI, MCP, and webhooks to technical teams.
- Credible security posture on paper: SOC 2 examined, GDPR and CCPA claimed, enterprise SSO, AES-256 and TLS encryption, and a public Trust Center.
- Unusual contractual transparency on training: uploaded documents are never used, and the terms detail each model provider’s commitments one by one.
Cons
- The enterprise security page and article 17 of the terms contradict each other on model training, and the terms are the enforceable document.
- No permanent free plan and no announced free trial, despite “Start Building Free” calls to action across the site.
- No refunds under any circumstances (terms art. 20), with an exception left to Pickaxe’s sole discretion in case of a proven hardware failure, and a six-month minimum term on Business.
- Pickaxe takes a cut of workspace revenue on top of the subscription: 10 percent on Gold, 8 percent on Pro, and as little as 2 percent on Business.
- Credits are consumed by your agent’s end users, not only by you, so a public agent can drain the balance.
- No hosting country or region published, no Pickaxe DPA available, no Article 27 EU representative, and a GDPR wording of intent rather than commitment.
- Feature gating and gaps: the API costs one cent per request on Gold and is only included from Pro, Slack and WhatsApp are Pro and above, DeepSeek is offered with no known no-training commitment, and there is no native mobile app.
Pricing & Plans
Pickaxe does not display a permanent free plan: the pricing table lists three paid plans only. The lowest entry point is the Gold plan at USD 37.00 per month, or USD 29.00 per month on an annual commitment, a 20 percent saving. Pro is priced at USD 147.00 per month, or USD 116.00 per month annually, and Business starts at USD 597.00 per month with a six-month minimum commitment. Each subscription includes monthly credits — USD 15 on Gold, USD 50 on Pro, a custom package on Business — where one dollar of credit equals one dollar of usage cost, drawn down on every generation, including generations triggered by your agent’s end users. Additional credits may be purchased separately. The Agent and Workspace API is billed at one cent per request on Gold and is included from Pro upward, custom plans are available on request, and no refunds are provided (terms art. 20).
- USD 15 per month in credits
- white-labeling
- up to 3 workspaces
- 3 actions per agent
- API at one cent per request
- 1 collaborator per workspace
- all recent models
- 50 knowledge-base documents per workspace
- USD 50 per month in credits
- API included
- unlimited workspaces
- unlimited document uploads and action connections
- Slack and WhatsApp deployments
- 100 user memories per workspace
- 4 collaborators per workspace
- 92 percent revenue retention
- custom credit package
- up to 98 percent revenue retention
- increased upload bandwidth
- dedicated support
- custom solutions
- 5+ collaborators per workspace
- advanced SSO and user management
- advanced client analytics
- unlimited agents
- monetization
- embeds
- white labeling
- end-user document uploads
- a custom domain
- connecting your own accounts for Actions
- and email deployments.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Pickaxe handles your data.
GDPR overview
Every page carries “GDPR Compliant”, “CCPA Compliant”, and “SOC2 Compliant” badges, and the security page claims SOC 2 examined status. The privacy policy of 16 March 2025 is markedly more cautious: “We intend to generally hold ourselves to the standard required for GDPR compliance.” That is a statement of intent, not a commitment. Article 6 grants people in the EEA, the United Kingdom, California, and elsewhere rights of access, erasure, rectification, portability, and restriction, plus withdrawal of consent, objection, and complaint to their local authority; rights are exercised from the Pickaxe account or by email to info@pickaxeproject.com. Article 13 confirms compliance with the Google API Services User Data Policy, Limited Use requirements included, and the minimum age is 13. The gaps are explicit: no Article 27 EU representative, no named DPO, no published DPA, and SOC 2 reports reserved for enterprise customers.
Who owns the data?
Ownership splits three ways. Pickaxe keeps its software and content, even after installation on your devices, and its branding remains its exclusive property. The agent builder keeps their own data: the security page states that “your organization retains full data ownership”. End users hold the least, since the privacy policy of 16 March 2025 treats any text submitted to a pickaxe as data accessible to that agent’s owner, who may publish it or use it to improve the agent. Three clauses widen Pickaxe’s rights further: feedback is not confidential and may be used without restriction or compensation, publishing an agent as a template grants every user an irrevocable, sub-licensable license, and recording a call grants Pickaxe a perpetual worldwide license over your image, voice, and name.
Reuse rights
The privacy policy of 16 March 2025 lists the declared purposes: providing, administering, and analyzing the service, improving it and conducting research, communicating with users, developing new programs, preventing fraud, complying with legal obligations, and transferring data in a corporate transaction. Data is shared with hosting, cloud, IT, emailing, and analytics vendors, and on lawful request. Pickaxe states that it does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-contextual behavioral advertising. Model training is the sensitive point, and the two documents disagree. Article 17 of the terms, dated 5 January 2026, allows Pickaxe to use interaction data — user prompts and model outputs — to train models, while excluding uploaded documents entirely and excluding data generated by Pro-tier members for as long as they hold that membership, with no retroactive effect and no protection afterwards. The enterprise security page says the opposite, claiming conversation data is never used to train AI models. The contract, not the marketing page, is the enforceable text. The terms also record what each model provider commits to as of 30 July 2025, from 30-day deletion and no training at OpenAI, xAI, and Mistral to no stated no-training commitment at DeepSeek. Separately, content supplied to Beta Services may be used to improve the service, and agent owners may reuse the inputs their end users submit without asking further permission.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Pickaxe publishes no hosting location. Neither the privacy policy of 16 March 2025, nor the terms of 5 January 2026, nor the enterprise security page names a country, a region, or a cloud provider; the privacy policy only mentions relying on hosting and cloud vendors, without identifying them. The resolved IP address, 76.76.21.21, belongs to an anycast CDN node and says nothing about where data is stored, so it should not be read as a hosting jurisdiction. What is documented is the protection rather than the place: the terms state that “all data is encrypted at rest with AES-256, and in transit with TLS”, and article 18 commits to industry-standard administrative, physical, and technical safeguards, least-privilege access controls, vulnerability management, monitoring, and periodic security testing. The security page adds enterprise SSO, role-based access controls, and granular permissions. Pickaxe reports SOC 2 examined status for security, availability, and confidentiality, with reports available to enterprise customers through its Vanta Trust Center. For anyone with a data residency requirement, the missing jurisdiction and the absent DPA are the two points to raise before signing.
Where Pickaxe works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Pickaxe.
- Model training: the enterprise security page claims that knowledge base content and conversation data are never used to train AI models, while article 17 of the terms, dated 5 January 2026, allows training on interaction data for everyone outside the Pro tier. The contract governs, not the marketing page. The Pro exclusion is neither retroactive nor kept after the subscription ends, and the terms themselves acknowledge that DeepSeek carries no known no-training commitment.
- End-user inputs are accessible to the owner of the agent, who may publish them or use them to improve it. Anyone deploying a public agent should tell the people using it, and anyone using someone else’s pickaxe should assume their messages are readable.
- No refunds under any circumstances (terms art. 20), including accidental purchase, forgotten cancellation, or simple non-use, and the Business plan locks in six months.
- Credits are drawn down by your agent’s end users, so a public agent can empty your balance. On top of that, Pickaxe keeps 10 percent of workspace revenue on Gold, 8 percent on Pro, and 2 percent on Business, and bills the API at one cent per request on Gold.
- Regional restrictions are declared in article 14 of the terms with no list of countries published: checking local compliance is left entirely to the user, and individual model providers add their own restrictions.
- No hosting country or region is declared, no Pickaxe DPA is published, SOC 2 reports are reserved for enterprise customers, and no EU representative is designated under Article 27.
- Turning an agent into a template grants every user of the platform an irrevocable, royalty-free, sub-licensable license over it. Read both legal documents rather than one: the privacy policy dates from 16 March 2025 and the terms from 5 January 2026, ten months apart.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for building, higher for selling. The builder is visual and needs no code, an automatic builder even drafts the prompt from a plain-language description, and embedding takes one line of code on Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Notion, WordPress, or Shopify, while a custom domain needs a single DNS record. One customer did in half an hour what he expected to hire a Python developer for. The real effort is commercial: mastering the credit economics and configuring monetization tiers. Developers get per-agent API keys with cURL, Node, and Python samples, webhooks, MCP, and a CLI. Pickaxe also builds agents on request.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Pickaxe
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is a Pickaxe agent?
How do credits work?
Do the people using my agent spend my credits?
Can I sell the agents I build?
Is there a free plan?
Does Pickaxe train models on my data?
Where can I deploy an agent?
Is there an API?
Can I get a refund?
Which integrations are available?
Should you pick Pickaxe?
Pickaxe answers the question most agent builders leave open: once the agent works, how do you sell it? Building, multi-channel deployment, and monetization live in the same product, and that combination — branded portals, Stripe billing, access control, usage tracking — is what justifies the price for consultants, coaches, trainers, and agencies who resell AI to their clients. Everything else it does well, from 72 models across ten providers to 500+ actions, exists elsewhere; the commercial layer is the reason to choose it.
The compliance posture looks solid on paper — SOC 2 examined, enterprise SSO, AES-256 at rest, TLS in transit — but it has two blind spots: no hosting country or region is declared, and no Pickaxe DPA is published. Regulated buyers should treat both as unresolved.
The point deserving the most attention is a contradiction between two Pickaxe documents. The enterprise security page states that conversation data is never used to train AI models, while article 17 of the terms, dated 5 January 2026, permits training on interaction data for everyone outside the Pro tier. The contract prevails. Anyone whose agents will handle sensitive conversations should treat the terms as the operative text and budget for Pro accordingly, knowing the exclusion is not retroactive and ends with the subscription.
Finally, understand the economics before committing. You pay a subscription, then credits that your agent’s end users consume on your behalf, then a 2 to 10 percent cut of workspace revenue, and there are no refunds under any circumstances. Entry is USD 37 per month; the Pro tier at USD 147 per month is where the API is included and the training exclusion applies. Measured against a developer’s day rate, that is inexpensive. Measured as a subscription for a side project, it is not.
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