FirstHandAPI

What the FirstHandAPI MCP server does

The FirstHandAPI MCP server was designed to let AI agents request human-collected photos, audio, video, and screen recordings through FirstHandAPI. Its intended use cases included user-generated content collection, ground-truth datasets for AI evaluation, and multimodal model training data.

The repository is now archived. FirstHandAPI's API endpoint, api.firsthandapi.com, is permanently offline, and the npm package is deprecated. As a result, the server cannot create or retrieve live collection jobs. The implementation remains available as a reference for an MCP server that used a keyless bootstrap flow.

How it works

Before shutdown, the package could start without an API key and expose a signup tool. An agent supplied an organization name and email address, then received an API key and introductory credits. The key was displayed once and had to be saved before restarting the process with authentication configured.

With an API key, the FirstHandAPI MCP server exposed seven job-related tools. These covered creating jobs, checking status, waiting for completion, filtering job lists, cancelling open jobs, retrieving approved files, and checking credits. Job creation accepted an optional location constraint, either as a city and state or as latitude, longitude, and radius in kilometres.

That workflow is no longer operational. Signup cannot issue keys, and every tool request fails with a network error because the upstream service is unavailable.

Setup and configuration

The original package could be installed with npm or launched directly through npx:

npm install @firsthandapi/mcp-server
npx @firsthandapi/mcp-server

A configured deployment used FIRSTHAND_API_KEY. FIRSTHAND_BASE_URL could override the default API address, and FIRSTHAND_TIMEOUT_MS could set the request timeout, whose documented default was 30,000 milliseconds.

The README included configurations for Claude Code and Cursor using an MCP command that launches the package through npx. These configurations are preserved as historical examples only; changing the endpoint or timeout does not restore service availability.

Tools and capabilities

The documented tools were:

• create_job: submit a content-collection job.
• create_job_and_wait: submit a job and wait for its completion.
• get_job: retrieve job status and details.
• list_jobs: list jobs with filters.
• cancel_job: cancel an open job.
• get_job_files: retrieve approved files and download URLs.
• get_credits: check the account credit balance.

The original unauthenticated startup also exposed signup. Because the service has been discontinued, these tool definitions describe the former interface rather than usable capabilities.

Limitations and notes

The FirstHandAPI MCP server should not be selected for a production collection workflow. The upstream service is offline, the package is deprecated on all versions, and signup no longer provisions credentials or credits. No live integration, file delivery, job processing, or credit lookup should be expected.

The repository may still help developers study MCP packaging, stdio startup, environment-based configuration, and a bootstrap tool that operated before authentication. The README identifies the project license as proprietary.