Surface Shopping / Translation / Security as top-level category tabs on pay.sh

[arthurmaiav]

Observation

The pay.sh homepage currently exposes 9 category tabs plus an "Other" bucket holding 15 services. But of those 15, 11 already have a clear non-other category in the published catalog — they're being collapsed because the homepage tab list is narrower than the registry's category vocabulary.

This produces an inconsistency: finance (2 services) gets its own tab, while security (4), translation (4), and shopping (3) are hidden in "Other" — even though every one of those is larger than finance.

Data

Pulled from https://pay.sh/api/catalog (75 providers, generated_at: 2026-05-05). Mapped each provider's catalog category against the homepage tab list:

catalog category	services	has tab?
ai_ml	33	✅ AI/ML
data	6	✅ DATA
search	5	✅ SEARCH
messaging	4	✅ MESSAGING
media	4	✅ MEDIA
maps	4	✅ MAPS
security	4	❌ Other
translation	4	❌ Other
shopping	3	❌ Other
finance	2	✅ CRYPTO/FINANCE
identity	2	❌ Other
cloud / compute / devtools / storage	1 each	mixed

Cross-referenced against pay-skills/CONTRIBUTING.md, which already canonicalizes these 17 categories: ai_ml cloud compute data devtools finance identity maps media messaging other productivity search security shopping storage translation. The catalog vocabulary is intentionally broad; the homepage tabs are narrower.

Why it matters

• Discovery. Three of the categories currently in "Other" describe high-intent agent workloads: shopping (buy/checkout/marketplace), translation (i18n/localization), security (moderation/CAPTCHA/risk). These are exactly the queries an agent operator scans the catalog for.
• Consistency with the catalog vocabulary. The registry already accepts and documents these categories; the brochure UI is the only place where they collapse.
• Low cost. No catalog change required — every affected provider already self-reports the right category in its PAY.md.

Proposed change

On the homepage tab list, add (or auto-derive) a tab for any category with ≥ 3 services in the catalog. Today that promotes:

• SHOPPING (3): crushrewards/pricing, merit-systems/stablemerch/merchandise, purch/marketplace
• SECURITY (4): four solana-foundation/alibaba/* moderation/audit services
• TRANSLATION (4): solana-foundation/alibaba/anytrans, …/machinetranslation, …/translate, solana-foundation/google/translate

finance (2) already has a tab, so the existing threshold appears to be ≤2. Either lowering it to 2 (which adds identity too) or pinning it at 3 would resolve the inconsistency.

If a hardcoded tab list is preferred over derive-from-catalog, the same three tabs could simply be added by hand.

Out of scope

• No PR attached because the pay.sh frontend doesn't appear to be in this repo (only pay, pay-skills, and x402-sdk are open). Happy to send a PR if the frontend source becomes accessible, or to keep this as a UX/product issue if maintainers prefer to land it themselves.