Top Road Built the Cash Register the GPT Store Forgot

Open the OpenAI GPT Store and you will find something close to an app economy in miniature. There are GPTs that grade essays, plan trips, write cold emails, read tarot cards. What you will not find, tucked next to most of them, is a way to pay. For the person who spent a weekend crafting the instructions behind one of those bots, that omission has a name. It is the reason a hobby stays a hobby. Top Road, a company out of Sydney, was built to fix it.

Top Road makes no-code payment and analytics tools for custom GPTs. A creator adds the company's action to their GPT, and suddenly the bot can charge a subscription, offer a free trial, sell lifetime access, take a donation, collect an email, or lock its doors to everyone except a whitelist of paying clients. No Stripe integration to wire up by hand. No authentication code. The creator keeps building the thing people actually want to talk to; Top Road runs the register behind it.

The company is a Y Combinator Winter 2022 company, though its current product dates to 2024 - after ChatGPT's GPT Store opened a door that did not exist when the founders first walked into YC. It is run by two people: Jeevika Makani, the co-founder and CEO, and Celilsemi Sam Erkiner, who handles the engineering. That is the whole team. It is also, so far, enough.

01 / THE GAPThe store with no checkout

Platforms have a habit of arriving without a cash register. The early App Store had apps long before it had a mature way to charge for them well; YouTube had creators long before it had a way to pay them. The GPT Store followed the pattern. OpenAI made it trivial to build and publish a custom GPT and much harder to earn from one. Millions of GPTs, and for most of them, no button that said "pay."

That is the gap Top Road stepped into. The insight is not glamorous - "add a paywall to a GPT" does not stop anyone mid-scroll - but it is the difference between a clever demo and a business. And it is the kind of gap that only shows up if you are paying attention to the people building on a platform rather than the platform itself.

02 / WHAT IT DOESFour clicks, then a business

The core product goes by GPT Tools (it launched under the name GPT Builder Tools). Mechanically, it is an "action" - the mechanism OpenAI provides for a GPT to talk to an outside service. A creator drops Top Road's action into their GPT, and the bot gains the ability to handle money and identity mid-conversation.

The analytics half is quieter but arguably stickier. Creators get a dashboard: daily chat counts, revenue tracking, a usage-by-map view of where their users are, and - with the user's permission - summaries of what people are actually asking. There is also a search-terms report, which tells a builder which keywords are surfacing their GPT inside the store. Call it SEO for a place nobody thought of as a search engine until they needed to be found in it.

03 / WHO USES ITThe makeup artist and the agency in Angola

The customer for Top Road is not, mostly, a software company. It is the person on the edge of the AI economy who has domain knowledge and a good prompt but no engineering team. A teacher who built a makeup-artist GPT. Consultants and coaches who want to hand a private GPT to clients without publishing it to the world. Small developers who want a second income stream.

One of the more striking users is Tech by Tech, an agency in Angola that says it built one of the first AI revenue streams out of Africa on top of the tool. That reach - a Sydney startup enabling a payment flow for a builder in Luanda, selling to users anywhere - is the part of the story that maps to the company's stated mission: to let creators earn new income by leveraging generative AI, wherever they happen to be.

04 / THE MODELFreemium, plus a slice

Top Road makes money two ways at once: a subscription for its own software, and a take-rate on the money creators earn through it. The free tier gets analytics, paywall setup and withdrawals, but Top Road keeps a 30% seller fee. Pay $10 a month for Pro and that fee drops to 20%, plus you get AI-powered business analysis and custom paywall options. The $90-a-month Business plan adds collaboration, whitelisting, email capture and custom API integrations.

It is a structure with history. The take-rate falling as you pay more is the same lever app stores and marketplaces have pulled for years - align the platform's cut with the creator's success, and give the biggest earners a reason to upgrade. What is new is the surface it runs on.

05 / THE COMPETITIONPicks and shovels, not another model

Most of the noise in AI is about models - who has the biggest, the fastest, the cheapest. Top Road is not in that race, and that is the point. It is selling picks and shovels to the people mining someone else's platform. The alternative to Top Road is either wiring up Stripe and auth yourself - weeks of work most GPT builders will never do - or waiting for OpenAI to build native monetization, or using a rival GPT-monetization layer.

The bet embedded in the company is that owning the payment and data rail on a platform can be more durable than owning the platform. It is early, and it depends on OpenAI leaving the shelf open. But the history of ecosystems is kind to the businesses that show up first with the boring infrastructure everyone ends up needing.

06 / THE FOUNDERSFrom rentals to fintech to GPTs

Jeevika Makani did not arrive at AI monetization by way of a research lab. She studied economics at the University of Melbourne, took an MBA at INSEAD, and worked at early-stage startups including Fat Llama, the peer-to-peer rental marketplace (itself a YC company), and Lendable, a fintech focused on emerging markets. The thread running through that resume - marketplaces, lending, access to income in places that are usually underserved - shows up again in Top Road's insistence that a creator in Angola should be able to get paid as easily as one in Sydney.

Her co-founder, Celilsemi Sam Erkiner, is a full-stack engineer who has shipped across web, mobile and smartwatch platforms and contributed to open source. Two people, one economist-operator and one builder, covering a company between them.

The company sits inside a few useful networks: Y Combinator (W22), the investor Loyal VC, and startup programs at NVIDIA (Inception) and AWS. Recognition arrived in September 2024, when GPT Builder Tools won Product Hunt's Launch of the Day and cleared 300 upvotes - a modest but real signal that other builders wanted what it was selling.

07 / WHERE IT FITSThe morning after the gold rush

The interesting question is not whether people will keep building GPTs. It is whether building one can be a living rather than a lark. Top Road is a wager that it can - that the AI creator economy needs the same unglamorous machinery every creator economy before it needed, and that whoever supplies it early has a seat at the table. In ten years, the specific product may look nothing like today's. The gap it noticed - a store that forgot to include a way to get paid - is the kind of thing worth building a company around.

Sources: Top Road (toproad.ai), Y Combinator, Product Hunt, Crunchbase, Day One FM, company blog. Figures such as "$300K+ enabled" and time-to-launch comparisons are company-reported or illustrative approximations.