mcpbeat

CostBench MCP Server

com.costbench/mcp
answering

CostBench is answering right now. Last checked 14 min ago. It exposes 8 tools. Last commit 26 Jul 2026.

Verified pricing, hidden costs, negotiation data & TCO for 3,290+ software products.

Uptime history 39 hours of history
39 hours agonow
100.0%
Uptime 24h
91 of 91 checks
8
Tools
read from the server
278 ms
Response time
average over 24h
0
Stars
last commit 26 Jul 2026

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 14 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add mcp --transport http https://costbench.com/mcp
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp": {
      "url": "https://costbench.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.mcp]
url = "https://costbench.com/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp": {
      "url": "https://costbench.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp": {
      "url": "https://costbench.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 8

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

calculate
calculate_tco
Total cost of ownership for a product and team size: sourced line items (licenses with price escalation, benchmark implementation), year-one + multi-year totals, effective per-seat cost. The defensible "true cost for an N-person team" answer.
compare
compare_software
Side-by-side pricing comparison of 2–4 products (starting price, enterprise tier, median annual cost, free tier, ratings).
discover
discover_software
Find software products by criteria (category, max price, free tier). Returns matching slugs to look up.
estimate
estimate_llm_cost
Estimate the cost of an LLM/API workload (input + output tokens) for a usage-priced provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock…) from its real rate card.
hidden
get_hidden_costs
The documented hidden/implementation/add-on costs of a product (uplifts, onboarding fees, overages), each with a sourced quote + date. The "what they don't tell you" answer.
negotiation
get_negotiation_tips
Sourced negotiation tactics for a product with success-likelihood (how to get a discount).
price
get_price_history
Dated per-quarter snapshots of a product's pricing page. Returns observations, NOT a trend figure — CostBench does not publish one, because diffing snapshots across renamed/restructured plan lineups is ~90% measurement artifact.
pricing
get_pricing
Full sourced pricing record for a software product: tiers, hidden costs, contract terms, market data, sentiment, negotiation tips, TCO scenarios, price history — every claim with its sources + a confidence/verification envelope.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://costbench.com/mcp streamable-http answering 299 ms 14 min ago

CostBench — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can CostBench do?
It exposes 8 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: calculate_tco, compare_software, discover_software, estimate_llm_cost, get_hidden_costs, get_negotiation_tips and 2 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 →
Is CostBench working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 91 of 91 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 278 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
How do I connect CostBench?
Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does CostBench need an API key?
No. CostBench completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 8 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is CostBench?
It answers our handshake in 278 ms on average, which is faster than 49% of all working MCP servers we measure. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.
Is CostBench open source?
Yes — it is published under the MIT licence, written in JavaScript and 0 stars on GitHub. The source link is on this page, so you can read exactly what it does with your data before you connect it.