The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the The Front Desk Review listing page.
Independent, sourced data on what things cost and how they actually perform. 4,764 products across 359 hardware categories, plus software pricing across 267 categories — every figure traced to its source (the vendor's own page URL and the date we captured it). Quote-only tiers and unknown specs are recorded as null rather than guessed. Nothing is invented.
Current version: 2026-06-12.
This dataset is served by a live Model Context Protocol server. No API key, no account, read-only. Every record an assistant receives carries its source URL and capture date, so any figure it repeats can be cited.
Endpoint: https://mcp.frontdeskreview.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP)
Claude Code:
Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf — add to the client's MCP config:
VS Code (Copilot agent) — .vscode/mcp.json uses a top-level servers key:
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can add it from their own connector settings — paste the endpoint and leave authentication set to None. Setup for every client: https://frontdeskreview.com/connect/
Registry entry: com.frontdeskreview/front-desk-review-data · server card: https://mcp.frontdeskreview.com/mcp/server-card
All 19 are read-only and annotated as such, so a client can call them without prompting on every request.
| Tool | What it answers |
|---|---|
list_sections | Every software/SaaS pricing theme covered, with slug, label and vendor count. |
search_vendors | Free-text search across a theme's vendors — names, domains, integrations, plan notes, capabilities. |
compare | Named vendors side by side within a theme, full sourced records. |
get_normalized_pricing | Effective monthly cost at a chosen volume, with flat, per-minute and per-call billing reduced to one comparable number. |
get_benchmark | One vendor's card: entry price, cost at reference volumes, compliance, free tier, integration breadth. |
find_best | “Cheapest X with a free tier / HIPAA / SOC 2 / GDPR” — ranked, and never on an unverified claim. |
list_coverage | What the index covers, how many vendors, over what date range — and what it does not cover. |
whats_changed | Recent price changes, each dated and corroborated by two sources. |
get_price_history | The full dated price series for one product or vendor, plus archived points read off Internet Archive snapshots. |
price_movers | What moved most recently across a category or the whole index. |
volatility_for_entity | How much one product's price actually moves — withheld rather than guessed when the record is too thin. |
most_volatile_in_category | The least stable prices in a category, ranked. |
list_product_categories | Every hardware category, with product counts, comparable spec keys and brands. |
search_products | Free-text search inside a hardware category across names, brands and spec values. |
compare_products | Named products lined up on the spec keys that category actually compares on. |
find_products | “Best under $N” or “most ” — filter and rank by price, release date or any spec. |
get_independent_test_coverage | How many independent labs measured a product, and what they measured — a count of evidence, never a rating. |
list_cost_decoders | Which categories have a cost decoder explaining what actually drives the bill. |
get_cost_decoder | The drivers behind a category's real cost, so a quoted price can be read properly. |
<category>.json — full records, each figure with provenance (source URL + accessed date)<category>.csv — one flat row per plan/product, with source columnscatalog.json — schema.org DataCatalog indexcroissant.json — ML Commons Croissant 1.1 descriptor (Google Dataset Search / Hugging Face)datapackage.json — Frictionless Data Package (Table Schema per CSV)CITATION.cff — machine-readable citationLICENSE — CC BY 4.0Published prices are normalized to a common monthly basis; both the raw published figure and the
normalized one are kept. Each row carries its own accessedAt date and is re-checked on a rolling
basis. Independent-test coverage counts how many labs measured a product — a count of evidence,
never a rating. Full methodology: https://frontdeskreview.com/data
CC BY 4.0 — free to use with attribution to The Front Desk Review (https://frontdeskreview.com).
See CITATION.cff.