Franklin

The pitch in one paragraph

Most coding agents write code. Franklin Agent writes code and spends money to get the job done. It holds a USDC wallet, picks the best model per task from 55+ providers, purchases trading data, generates images, pays for web search — all autonomously. You state an outcome and set a budget. Franklin Agent decides what to call, what to pay for, and when to stop. Every paid action routes through the x402 micropayment protocol and settles against your own wallet. No subscriptions. No API keys. No account. The wallet is the identity.

Built by the BlockRun team. Apache-2.0. TypeScript. Ships as one npm package.

YOPO — You Only Pay Outcome

Not a subscription (pay for access). Not a generic pay-per-call (pay for trying). You pay only for the work Franklin Agent delivers. Provider cost + 5%, settled per action in USDC. No monthly fees. No rate limits. No overdraft.

Quick start

Requires Node.js 20.19+ (Node 22 LTS recommended). Check with node -v. Older Node crashes at startup with ERR_REQUIRE_ESM.

# 1. Install
npm install -g @blockrun/franklin

# 2. Run (free — uses NVIDIA Nemotron & Qwen3 Coder out of the box)
franklin

# 3. (optional) Fund a wallet to unlock Sonnet, Opus, GPT, Gemini, Grok, + paid APIs
franklin setup base        # or: franklin setup solana
franklin balance           # show address + USDC balance

That's it. Zero signup, zero credit card, zero phone verification. Send $5 of USDC to the wallet and you've unlocked every frontier model and every paid tool in the BlockRun gateway.

No global install? Just run it directly — no permissions, no -g:

npx @blockrun/franklin

Install troubleshooting

The clean, permanent fix for both is a user-owned Node so global installs never touch root-owned system folders:

# nvm (https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm)
nvm install 22 && nvm use 22
npm install -g @blockrun/franklin

# or fnm (https://github.com/Schniz/fnm)
fnm install 22 && fnm use 22
npm install -g @blockrun/franklin

Prefer a GUI? Try Franklin for VS Code

The same agent ships as a VS Code extension — chat panel, model picker, wallet balance, image / video generation, inline diff cards — all driven by the wallet you already funded for the CLI.

VS Code → Extensions  (Cmd+Shift+X / Ctrl+Shift+X)
        → search "Franklin" → Install
        → click the Franklin icon in the Activity Bar

Free models work immediately. Paid models, image gen, and video gen activate the moment your wallet has USDC. The CLI and the extension share the same ~/.blockrun/ config and session history, so jumping between terminal and VS Code is seamless.

YOPO

You Only Pay Outcome. This is Franklin Agent's pricing model, and it is the opposite of almost every other AI product you use.

Three consequences fall out of this:

1. No subscriptions. Use Franklin for $0.50 one week and $50 the next — you pay for compute actually consumed, nothing more.
2. No rate limits. Subscriptions throttle you when you need AI most. YOPO has no artificial caps — if you have USDC, you have access.
3. No overdraft. The wallet balance IS the hard limit. When it's empty, Franklin stops. No surprise bills, no 3 a.m. rate-limit walls.

Concretely — $1 in USDC gets you roughly:

• ~400K GPT-4o input tokens
• ~7M DeepSeek tokens
• ~13M Gemini Flash tokens
• ~20 DALL-E 3 images
• ~40 Exa neural web searches
• Unlimited agent-tested NVIDIA free tier (Qwen3 Coder + Llama 4 Maverick, no wallet needed)

A new category

Economic Agent

Software that can hold a wallet, price its own actions, spend toward an outcome, and stop at a hard budget cap.

Most AI products fit into one of three buckets: they answer questions, write code, or automate a fixed workflow. None of them can spend money.

Franklin can. It combines purchasing power (it pays for models, tools, and APIs), budget awareness (cost is part of the loop, not an afterthought), cross-vertical execution (code, trading, research, marketing, ops), and hard stopping conditions (wallet balance is a real constraint, not a suggestion).

That is why Franklin is an economic agent, not just a task agent.

What Franklin can execute

Franklin is chat-first. You do not wire a DAG, configure six API keys, or commit to one model vendor. You state an outcome. Franklin decides what to read, search, fetch, call, and pay for.

📈 Trading signals

> what's BTC looking like today?

  ✓ TradingSignal  BTC

  ## BTC Signal Report

  Price: $71,056 USD (+2.3% 24h)
  Market Cap: $1.42T
  24h Volume: $29.6B

  ### Technical Indicators (30d)
  - RSI(14): 53.2 — neutral
  - MACD: 339.21 / Signal: 280.45 — bullish crossover
  - Bollinger: within band (upper $73,773 / lower $64,545)
  - Volatility: 35.3% annualized — medium

> if I enter at 65000 with $1000, where should my stop be?

  Based on ATR(14) and support at $63,500:
  Entry: $65,000 · Stop: $63,200 (−2.8%) · Risk: $27.69
  Risk/reward to $70K target: 1:2.8 ✓

Live data from CoinGecko. RSI, MACD, Bollinger, and volatility computed locally. No API key needed.

🎨 Image generation

> generate a logo for my AI startup — minimalist, dark background

  ✓ ImageGen  "minimalist AI startup logo, dark background..."
  Saved: generated-logo-1713052800.png (1024x1024)

Generates images via DALL-E / GPT Image directly from the CLI. Paid from your wallet — no OpenAI API key needed.

📱 Remote control via Telegram

Run franklin telegram on an always-on machine (set TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN + TELEGRAM_OWNER_ID) and drive Franklin from your phone. Owner-locked, session-resumable across restarts, slash commands (/new, /balance, /status). Trading, content, dev work — all reachable from a Telegram chat.

🔎 Research, code, anything with a budget

> compare the top 5 AI agent pricing models, summarize the patterns, and save a note for me

  ✓ WebSearch  ai agent pricing models
  ✓ WebFetch   5 articles
  ✓ Write      notes/agent-pricing.md

  Summary:
  - Most agents hide pricing behind monthly seats
  - Usage-based products win with power users and te