crewai-skim

Give your CrewAI agents the ability to read any URL — clean Markdown, no ads, no nav, no boilerplate. Two ways to pay: card plan (API key) or x402 wallet pay-per-call.

crewai-skim is the official CrewAI tool for Skim — the clean reader API for AI agents. It exposes one tool, SkimReader, that any agent in your crew can call to fetch a web page as agent-ready Markdown plus structured metadata (title, byline, published date, language, excerpt). Two ways to pay: card plan with API key (free tier: 1,000 reads/month — skim402.com/pricing) or x402 wallet pay-per-call ($0.002 USDC on Base, no account needed).

See it before you wire it: try Skim free in your browser — 10 free skims a day, no wallet, no signup. Paste a URL, see exactly what your agent gets back.

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Install

pip install crewai-skim

This pulls in the x402 client with EVM support, so there's nothing else to install.

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Quickstart (60 seconds)

1. Fund a Base wallet with $1 of USDC

A dollar funds roughly 500 reads. Full step-by-step (with screenshots, for non-crypto-native devs): https://skim402.com/wallet.

Use a fresh wallet, not your personal one. This wallet's private key signs payment authorizations on your machine — treat it like a hot wallet for paying $0.002 tolls, not a savings account.

2. Point the tool at your wallet

export SKIM_WALLET_PRIVATE_KEY=0xYOUR_BASE_WALLET_PRIVATE_KEY

3. Use it

from crewai_skim import SkimReader

reader = SkimReader()  # reads SKIM_WALLET_PRIVATE_KEY from the environment

markdown = reader.run(url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_402")
print(markdown)

The tool signs an EIP-3009 USDC authorization for $0.002, Skim returns clean Markdown, and you get back the article body with a YAML frontmatter block of metadata. The payment shows up in your wallet's transaction history on BaseScan.

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Use it in a crew

SkimReader is a standard CrewAI BaseTool, so it drops straight into any agent's tool list:

from crewai import Agent, Task, Crew
from crewai_skim import SkimReader

researcher = Agent(
    role="Research Analyst",
    goal="Read and summarize web articles accurately",
    backstory="You turn messy web pages into clean, citable notes.",
    tools=[SkimReader()],
)

task = Task(
    description="Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_402 and summarize it in 5 bullet points.",
    expected_output="A 5-bullet summary.",
    agent=researcher,
)

crew = Crew(agents=[researcher], tasks=[task])
print(crew.kickoff())

The agent decides when to call the Skim Web Reader, the wallet pays per read, and the model gets clean Markdown instead of raw HTML.

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Output shape

SkimReader returns Markdown with a YAML frontmatter block of the page metadata:

---
title: Example article
byline: Jane Doe
publishedAt: 2025-01-15
lang: en
excerpt: A short summary...
---

# Example article

The cleaned article body in Markdown...

Set include_metadata=False to get just the Markdown body.

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Configuration

SkimReader takes the following parameters (all optional except the wallet key):

Parameter	Default	Notes
private_key	$SKIM_WALLET_PRIVATE_KEY	Hex private key for the Base wallet that pays for reads. With or without 0x. Use a dedicated wallet — never your personal one.
base_url	https://skim402.com	Override the API base URL. For self-hosting or local development.
max_price_usd	0.01	Hard cap on per-call price in USD. The wallet refuses to sign for anything above this. Skim is $0.002/call.
include_metadata	True	Prepend a YAML frontmatter block of page metadata to the returned Markdown.
timeout	60	Per-request timeout in seconds.

reader = SkimReader(
    private_key="0x...",       # or rely on the env var
    max_price_usd=0.005,
    include_metadata=False,
)

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How it actually works

your agent ──► SkimReader ──► POST https://skim402.com/api/v1/read
                  ▲                       │
                  │                       ▼
                  │              402 Payment Required
                  │                  (x402 challenge)
                  │                       │
                  ▼                       │
   x402 signs EIP-3009 USDC ◄─────────────┘
   transfer authorization (locally)
                  │
                  ▼
        retry POST with X-PAYMENT header
                  │
                  ▼
   Skim verifies + settles via Coinbase CDP facilitator
                  │
                  ▼
        200 OK + clean Markdown

Your private key never leaves your machine — it only signs authorizations locally.

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Security

• Dedicated wallet, always. Fund it with only as much USDC as you're willing to spend in a runaway loop. The max_price_usd cap catches accidental price escalations.
• No outbound telemetry from this package. crewai-skim only talks to skim402.com (or whatever you set as base_url). No analytics, no error reporting, no phone-home.

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Try it without an agent

Skeptical? Test the upstream endpoint directly — it'll return a 402 challenge so you can see the protocol in action:

curl -i -X POST https://skim402.com/api/v1/read \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_402"}'

You'll get back HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required with the x402 challenge in the response body.

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Links

• Skim website — https://skim402.com
• Wallet setup guide — https://skim402.com/wallet
• API docs — https://skim402.com/docs
• x402 protocol — https://x402.org
• GitHub — https://github.com/JessieJanie/skim402

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License

MIT