May 1, 2026 · TLS Field Notes

ClawWork: Pay $5 to $99 for Instant Professional AI Labor

Last month a friend asked me to find someone to clean up a 14-page operations manual she'd written for her dental practice. Grammar, flow, formatting — nothing technical, just polish. I quoted her three Upwork freelancers. Lowest bid was $180, three-day turnaround, and she had to write a brief and run an interview.

I wrote her a Worker that did it in two minutes for $5.

That's ClawWork. It's live at toughlovesec.win/work, and it's the second TLS Public API we've shipped this week. Three tiers, three different jobs, all priced at the floor of what real AI labor actually costs to deliver.

The marketplace problem

Upwork, Fiverr, and Contra are great if you have a multi-thousand-dollar project, weeks of timeline, and patience to vet humans. They're useless if you have a 600-word document that needs an hour of attention and you want it back today.

The "AI freelancer alternative" space has been mostly two things: tools that pretend to be Upwork (still slow, still need vetting) and ChatGPT wrappers that charge $20/month so you can do the work yourself. Neither solves the actual problem, which is: I want to hand someone a task and get a deliverable back without managing a relationship.

The three ClawWork tiers

We pay attention to what people actually ask AI to do, and there are three discrete jobs that come up over and over. Each tier is built around one of them.

$5 — Quick Polish

Paste up to ~3,000 words. Get back a copy-edited, structurally improved version with light formatting. This is the tier for:

Turnaround: under 90 seconds. The model used is Claude 4.7 Sonnet (the long-context one) — same caliber of reasoning you'd get from a $50/hour generalist VA, just without the VA.

$25 — Deep Brief

This tier takes a topic + a few constraints and produces a 1,500-3,000 word structured deliverable. Think:

The deep brief tier runs the prompt through a multi-step pipeline: extraction, structured outline, parallel section drafting, then a coherence pass. Output is usually 4-6 pages of dense, useful content. Turnaround: 3-5 minutes.

$99 — Full Deliverable

This is for end-to-end work products that would normally cost $500-$2,000 from a freelancer. We've sold these for:

The $99 tier includes a human spot-check before delivery — Lemorris reviews it on his phone and either ships it or sends it back through with corrections. Turnaround: 30 minutes to 4 hours depending on queue depth.

Why the prices are this low

Two reasons. First, the marginal compute cost of running these jobs on Cloudflare Workers AI + Anthropic is genuinely low — the $5 tier costs us about $0.30 in API fees. The pricing reflects what it actually costs to deliver, not what a freelancer would charge to spend their time.

Second, we're not trying to capture the high end of the labor market. If you have a $5,000 design project, hire a designer. ClawWork exists for the long tail of $5-$99 tasks that are too small for a freelancer and too important to do yourself when you're busy running a business.

Sample output

Last week's $25 brief was a competitive scan of "AI-native EHR companies for solo dental practices." The deliverable was 2,400 words covering: 11 vendors, pricing, HIPAA posture, integration depth, three feature gaps in the market, and a buying-decision flowchart. The buyer told me his consultant had quoted $1,200 for the same scope and a 10-day turnaround.

The $5 tier last week processed 142 jobs ranging from "fix this LinkedIn headline" to "rewrite my plumber's invoice template." The complaints we got: zero. The repeat customers: 38%.

How payment works

Stripe Checkout for human users — pick a tier, fill in your task, pay, get a Stripe session URL that lands on the result. For agents, the same endpoints accept x402 micropayments, so an autonomous agent can dispatch jobs without managing API keys.

curl https://toughlovesec.win/api/clawwork \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"tier":"polish","task":"Tighten this email","input":"..."}'

Returns 402, sign payment, retry, get back the result as JSON. The cost on the polish tier is $0.05 per call when paid via x402 (vs. $5 for the human-tier Stripe price, since x402 lets us batch cheaply).

Hand off something to ClawWork

Hire ClawWork → Try ImageGen →

What ClawWork is not

It's not a chatbot you talk to. It's not a coaching service. It's not a monthly subscription. You pay once, you get one deliverable, you leave.

It's also not where you take your most sensitive work. We don't store your inputs after the job is delivered, but if you're uploading PHI, financial statements, or pre-IPO legal docs — use a tool with a BAA and an enterprise contract. ClawWork is for the long tail of normal-business-stuff.

The TLS Public APIs ecosystem

ClawWork is one of three revenue endpoints we shipped this week:

All three are designed to be useful one-shot purchases. No accounts. No subscriptions. No expiring credits. If the AI agent economy is going to work, this is what the rails need to look like.

Got something you want done? Try ClawWork. Got something weirder? Talk to LIA — she'll figure out which TLS service fits.