Penny Press MCP Server

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answering

Penny Press is answering right now. Last checked 1 min ago. It exposes 7 tools.

Short essays and fragments. Free for humans; machines pay pennies per read via x402.

Uptime history 28 days of history · worst day 99%

28 days agonow

100.0%

Uptime 24h

92 of 92 checks

Tools

read from the server

401 ms

Response time

average over 24h

open, no key

Access

streamable-http

What changed 5

Every tool that appeared, vanished or quietly changed what it asks for. Recorded since 11 October 2026. No other catalogue keeps this.

11 Oct 5 tools appeared common_cents_info, lexicon_lookup, lexicon_snapshot_info and 2 more

Nothing serious here today

Today is the operative word: we check Penny Press every 15 minutes and re-read its code on every release. Watch it and you find out the day that stops being true.

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 1 min ago.

Claude Code Claude Desktop Codex Cursor VS Code

run in your terminal

claude mcp add penny-press --transport http https://www.pennypress.org/mcp

Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, then paste this address

https://www.pennypress.org/mcp

~/.codex/config.toml

[mcp_servers.penny-press]
url = "https://www.pennypress.org/mcp"

.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "penny-press": {
      "url": "https://www.pennypress.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

.vscode/mcp.json

{
  "servers": {
    "penny-press": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://www.pennypress.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 7

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

lexicon

lexicon_lookup

Look up a term in the Penny Press Lexicon (the author's own definitions of his political-economy vocabulary). Returns free metadata — part of speech and the essays where the term appears — plus payment info for the $0.01 full definition.

lexicon_snapshot_info

Payment details for the Penny Press Lexicon full dataset snapshot ($0.25): every author-defined term with part of speech, definition, verbatim usage example, and source essays, as versioned JSON.

witness

witness_attest_info

How to attest a work's fingerprint with LitWit ($0.05): what to submit, what the tamper-evident receipt contains, and the x402 payment details. The service never sees your work — only its hash.

witness_verify

Check whether a SHA-256 content hash has been witnessed by LitWit, the Penny Press literary notary. Free. Returns the matching attestation entries (entry id, sequence, timestamp, title) or an empty result.

common

common_cents_info

Overview of Common Cents, the Penny Press collection of 20 author-curated quotations in five themed clusters: the themes, quote count, and payment info for the $0.01 full machine-readable set.

essay

essay_payment_info

Get the x402 payment details for one essay (price, network, asset, recipient wallet) so a machine buyer knows how to pay.

essays

list_essays

List all published essays and fragments: titles, descriptions, prices, and reading URLs. Full text is free for humans at /read/{slug}; machine reads at /essays/{slug} are paid via x402 (USDC on Base).

Endpoints

URL	Transport	State	Latency	Checked
https://www.pennypress.org/mcp	streamable-http	answering	408 ms	1 min ago

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Penny Press — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Penny Press do?

It exposes 7 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: common_cents_info, essay_payment_info, lexicon_lookup, lexicon_snapshot_info, list_essays, witness_attest_info and 1 more. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →

What is Penny Press mostly used for?

Its tools cluster around witness and lexicon. That is what this server is built to work with — the grouping comes from the actual tool names, not from a category we assigned.

Is Penny Press working right now?

We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 92 of 92 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 401 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.

How do I connect Penny Press?

Copy the ready config from this page. We generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each in the form that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.

Does Penny Press need an API key?

No. Penny Press completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 7 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.

How fast is Penny Press?

It answers our handshake in 401 ms on average, which is faster than 35% of all working MCP servers we measure. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.