Shortlist Price Index MCP Server

The io.github.ies86/shortlist-price-index Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provides AI agents software pricing data. It focuses on entry prices (the lowest paid plan per provider) across 16 software categories, including ratings and true 3-year cost. Sources come from provider public pricing pages and are republished monthly since June 2026.

🛠️ Key Features

Entry prices for 16 categories (lowest paid plan per provider)
Ratings and true 3-year cost for each category/provider
Monthly republishing of compiled pricing data since June 2026
Data published as open data under CC BY 4.0

🚀 Use Cases

Comparing software pricing across providers by category
Assessing 3-year total cost using “true 3-year cost” figures
Gathering structured datasets for pricing-related agent workflows

⚡ Developer Benefits

Accessible via MCP with 4 tools
Labeled dataset topics: dataset, mcp, mcp-server, model-context-protocol, pricing-data
Mix of automated and hand-curated category measurement

⚠️ Limitations

Three categories (VPN, web hosting, cloud backup) are measured via an automated pipeline that archives source pages; remaining categories are hand-curated

Shortlist Price Index MCP server

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that gives AI agents software pricing data: entry prices (lowest paid plan per provider) for 16 categories, from VPNs and cloud backup to travel eSIMs and recruitment software. Prices are compiled from each provider's public pricing page and republished monthly since June 2026. Three categories (VPN, web hosting and cloud backup) are additionally measured by an automated pipeline that archives the source page behind every observation; the remaining categories are hand-curated. Published as open data under CC BY 4.0 by Orai Media.

Endpoint: https://shortlist-mcp.vercel.app/mcp (streamable HTTP, no auth, free)

Tools

Tool	What it does
`list_categories`	All tracked categories with slugs, units and currencies (11 USD/global + 5 Dutch EUR)
`get_price_index`	Full index for one category: average, median, cheapest, every provider sorted by price, monthly history, methodology
`get_true_3yr_cost`	Honest 3-year cost per provider (year 1 intro, years 2-3 at renewal), ranked by real total, with the renewal multiplier. Published for web hosting and antivirus today
`get_cheapest`	The N cheapest providers in a category right now, with a link to the full comparison

Every response includes a citation string and the CC BY 4.0 license note, so agents can attribute figures correctly.

Add to Claude Code

bash

claude mcp add --transport http shortlist-prices https://shortlist-mcp.vercel.app/mcp

Add to any MCP client

json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "shortlist-prices": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://shortlist-mcp.vercel.app/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Example questions your agent can now answer

"What does a VPN cost per month right now, and which three are cheapest?"
"Compare travel eSIM prices per GB for a summer trip."
"How much does an applicant tracking system cost for a single recruiter?"
"Wat kost een wachtwoordmanager per maand in Nederland?"

Data

The server reads the live Price Index JSON endpoints of the Shortlist comparison sites (republished monthly, cached one hour) and the open dataset repository:

Dataset with monthly history: https://github.com/ies86/shortlist-price-index
Kaggle mirror: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/ries86/shortlist-price-index

License: data CC BY 4.0 (attribution + link to the cited source site), code MIT.

Run locally

bash

npm install
npm run dev
# MCP endpoint on http://localhost:3000/mcp

Self-host with Docker

The included Dockerfile builds a self-contained image of the same server (the production endpoint above is the hosted equivalent):

bash

docker build -t shortlist-mcp .
docker run -p 3000:3000 shortlist-mcp
# MCP endpoint on http://localhost:3000/mcp

Built with mcp-handler on Next.js, deployed on Vercel.

category	string	required	Category slug from list_categories
top_n	integer	optional	How many providers to return (default 3)

Shortlist Price Index