Developers

A free, versioned JSON API and an MCP server expose the same trust-checked pricing data this site is built on — for scripts, dashboards, and LLM agents alike. 免费、版本化的 JSON API，以及一个把同一份数据暴露给 LLM Agent 使用的 MCP 服务器。

Free data API

Five read-only JSON files, rebuilt on every crawl. No API key, no rate-limit header to manage — CORS is open (Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *) and responses are cache-friendly (max-age=3600).

Endpoint	Contents
GET /api/v1/catalog.json	Catalog — Dataset-level counts and the last build timestamp. Envelope keys are merged as siblings here, not nested under data.
GET /api/v1/offerings.json	Offerings — Every API / usage-based model offering, including price components, trust status, and source evidence.
GET /api/v1/subscriptions.json	Subscriptions — Subscription and plan pricing — ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and similar flat-fee access tiers.
GET /api/v1/coding-tools.json	Coding tools — Pricing for AI coding assistants, editors, and CLI agents.
GET /api/v1/price-changes.json	Price changes — Recent price-change events across the catalog — the same feed that powers the homepage "what's new" list.

Every endpoint shares the same envelope. For catalog.json, whose payload is already an object, the envelope keys are merged in as siblings rather than nested under data.

{
  "schema_version": "v1",
  "generated_at": "2026-07-26T00:00:00Z",
  "license": "Free to use with attribution",
  "attribution": "AICostBook (https://aicostbook.com)",
  "count": 382,
  "data": [
    { "offering_id": "...", "model_name": "...", "input_price_per_1m_usd": 3, "..." : "..." }
  ]
}

Versioning policy: /api/v1 is additive-only — fields are only ever added, never removed or repurposed. A breaking change ships as /api/v2 instead, and /api/v1 keeps working unchanged.

MCP server

The same pricing data is available as five read-only tools over MCP, so an agent can search, compare, and cost out models without you wiring up the JSON endpoints yourself. The server speaks stateless streamable-HTTP JSON-RPC at:

POST https://aicostbook.com/mcp

Claude Desktop / Cursor — clients that support remote (URL) MCP servers directly:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aicostbook": {
      "url": "https://aicostbook.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Clients that only support local (stdio) servers can bridge with mcp-remote:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aicostbook": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://aicostbook.com/mcp"]
    }
  }
}

5 tools

search_models

Free-text search across offerings and subscriptions, filterable by type, official-only, and verified-only.

compare_offerings

Compare offerings and subscriptions side-by-side for a usage profile, sorted cheapest-first.

calculate_cost

Estimate the monthly cost of one specific offering for a given usage profile.

find_cheapest_entry

Return the single cheapest usage-based offering and the cheapest subscription plan for a usage profile.

get_price_history

Return recent price-change events for a given entity (model, provider, or tool).

License & attribution

Both the JSON API and the MCP server are free to use, including commercially, as long as you attribute AICostBook and link back to aicostbook.com. Every response also carries this in its own license / attribution fields, so you can propagate it automatically. These numbers come from the same independently verified pipeline described in /methodology. Questions, licensing, or a bug in the data — email admin@aicostbook.com.