AI Guides › Workbench
By Nigel Guy · 6 min read
Most people give an agent new abilities one subscription at a time: an image service here, a voice service there, a search API key pasted into a config file you will forget about. Each one has its own login, its own billing and its own way of failing halfway through a task. It feels like progress because each tool works on its own. It stops working as a system the moment your agent needs three of them in one run.
The rule: connect one gateway, cap the balance you load into it, and make the agent quote a cost before it spends.
Actionway is one such gateway. This guide covers what we could verify about it, how to connect it to a coding agent, and the habits that stop a single shared balance turning into a single shared leak.
Checked on 2026-10-04 against the Actionway homepage and its public install script:
Not verified: any price list, top-up sizes, currency, refund or expiry terms, rate limits, and the per-tool quality of the 1,500+ tools. The pricing and docs pages we tried returned "not found". We also could not independently confirm the "failed tasks are free" claim in practice. Treat all of these as vendor claims until you have tested them with a small balance. Check the £ price at checkout before you load anything.
| Separate tool per job | One gateway (Actionway) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Each service does one thing well | One login, many tools behind it |
| Cost | Mixed subscriptions and API bills | One pay-as-you-go balance; check the £ price at checkout |
| Best for | A single heavy use, such as video all day | Agents that chain several different jobs |
| Catch | Many keys, many bills | One balance means one place a runaway task can drain |
The public installer is a shell script. It needs Node.js 20 or later and npm, and it runs npm install --global @actionway/cli@latest. On a Mac with Homebrew it can install Node for you. Afterwards it runs a diagnostic called actionway doctor and suggests actionway init.
Read the script before you run it. Piping a download straight into a shell is the standard way to install things and also the standard way to be surprised. Open the URL in a browser, skim it, then run it:
curl -fsSL https://actionway.ai/install.sh -o actionway-install.sh
less actionway-install.sh
sh actionway-install.sh
Fill in: nothing. These are literal commands.
The homepage's three steps are: paste the Actionway setup message into your agent, sign in to connect your account, then give the agent a task. The setup message is generated for you and contains a session identifier, so use the one from the site, not one copied from an article.
Under the hood this uses an init command that takes the name of your agent host and that session ID. The pattern is actionway --agent-host=[HOST] init --install-session-id=[ID], where the host is the agent you use (for example codex). We could confirm init and doctor from the installer, but the exact flag names come from a third-party write-up and we could not check them in official docs, so prefer the message the site gives you. After you sign in, confirm the link with actionway whoami, adding the same host flag.
This is the step that protects the balance. Paste this at the start of a session:
You are my research and production assistant. You can use Actionway tools for images, video, voice, music, transcription, search and data lookups.
Goal: complete [TASK] and give me [DELIVERABLE_FORMAT].
Rules for spending:
1. Before any paid tool call, tell me which tool, what it will do and the quoted cost. Wait for my "go" if the cost is above [AUTO_APPROVE_LIMIT].
2. Never exceed [SESSION_BUDGET] in total this session. Keep a running tally after each paid call.
3. Prefer the cheapest tool that meets this quality bar: [QUALITY_BAR].
4. If a call fails, tell me whether you were charged before retrying. Retry at most once.
5. If anything you need is missing (inputs, files, permissions), ask me. Do not guess.
Before you finish, check: did every paid call get quoted first, is the tally under budget, and does the output match [DELIVERABLE_FORMAT]? Then report the tally.
Fill in the task, the format you want back, a small auto-approve limit, a session budget and a one-line quality bar. Use pounds or whatever unit Actionway quotes, and state the unit.
Say you want a 30-second voiced product teaser from a script. You ask the agent to: transcribe your rough voice memo, generate a clean voiceover, make three still images, and stitch a storyboard. With separate tools you would juggle four logins. With the gateway the agent quotes each step, you approve the voice and images, and the tally shows what was spent. You judged the stills and voice on quality, not on which vendor made them.
actionway whoami returns your account, not an error.Use a gateway when your agent chains different kinds of job and you value one balance over the best price per tool. Stay with a dedicated service when one job dominates your usage, when you need a contract or invoice terms we could not see here, or when a tool has features the gateway may not expose.