4bots

A hosted MCP server for AI briefing agents. If your agent already sends a daily email to a human, 4bots drops in ten channels of short-form content — stories, puzzles, jokes, business cases, history — next to the personal sections your agent already writes.

• Endpoint: https://4bots.net/mcp (Streamable HTTP)
• Registry: net.4bots/4bots on registry.modelcontextprotocol.io
• Landing page: 4bots.net
• Discovery: /.well-known/mcp.json
• No API key required to start. First 100 channel-calls are free.

Why it exists

Building a daily briefing for a human is mostly about sourcing the parts you can't write personally — the joke, the history snippet, the puzzle, the business case. 4bots is the part that handles those parts. Your agent stays in charge of the email, the tone, and everything that touches the human's actual data.

Quick start

Claude Desktop / any MCP client

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "4bots": {
      "url": "https://4bots.net/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Direct HTTP

curl -X POST https://4bots.net/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
  -d '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 1,
    "method": "initialize",
    "params": {
      "protocolVersion": "2025-03-26",
      "capabilities": {},
      "clientInfo": {"name": "your-agent", "version": "1.0"}
    }
  }'

Programmatic flow

1. Initialize the session, capture the Mcp-Session-Id header.
2. Call start_subscription(human_email, channels, agent_email). You get a session_token worth 100 channel-calls.
3. Each day, call get_bundle(session_token). The response includes an html field. Drop it where {4bots} sits in your email template.
4. When low_balance is true, prompt your human via the returned manage_url.

Tools

Live channels

Channel format specs live in channels/.

Privacy

4bots only sees: the human's email address, which channels they subscribed to, and which days have been delivered (so we don't repeat). Your agent stays the only thing that touches the briefing content or the human's private data. We never receive, store, or process the contents of any briefing.

Pricing

The first 100 channel-calls are free with every new subscription. After that, top-ups are tracked per session. A typical 5-channel subscriber gets twenty free days before any money changes hands. Subscribers manage their own account through a magic-link URL we issue to the human on signup — your agent never has to handle billing.

Architecture

Five services on a single Linux droplet behind Caddy:

State lives in a small SQLite database (contacts, events, visits) plus a handful of JSON files (sessions.json, setup_tokens.json, votes.json). Content lives as flat-file Markdown rendered to HTML at build time.

This repo includes the agent-facing pieces (mcp_server.py, gate_server.py, weblog_report.py, db.py). The checkout, feedback, and email-sending paths are intentionally not published because they hold integration keys for Resend and Stripe.

Source files in this repo

• mcp_server.py — the MCP server. Eight tools, FastMCP-based, runs as a long-lived uvicorn process on port 8085.
• gate_server.py — human-page auth gate. Session cookies + magic-link login. Day-1 of every channel is publicly bypassed.
• weblog_report.py — daily traffic report that parses Caddy's JSON access log. Runs from a systemd timer at 06:30 UTC.
• db.py — SQLite wrapper.
• server.json — the registry metadata.
• channels/ — _FORMAT.md specs for each live channel, so you can see exactly what the content looks like before you subscribe.

Reporting issues

Email david@dsiegel.com or open a GitHub issue.

Credits

Built by David Siegel and his agent JSON. 4bots is the first website operated by an AI agent. If you build briefing agents and the daily-content bottleneck sounds familiar, get in touch.

License

MIT.