Frugal MCP server

frugal

The open routing layer for AI tools.

Frugal is an MCP server that sits between your agent and its tool providers. You describe the job — a search, an extraction, a render, or just an intent — and Frugal decides how to complete it, routing each call per policy: cheapest capable provider by default, fastest or premium when you say so, pinned or denied when compliance says so, with automatic failover when a provider errors or comes up empty. Every response carries the decision — providerused, costusd, and (via frugal__execute) a one-line reason — so you can audit why each call went where it did.

Works with any model. One Go binary. Your keys. No account. Self-host everything, no lock-in. Source-available (BUSL 1.1 → Apache 2.0).

Install to first intelligently routed tool call: under five minutes.

frugal.sh

Install

curl -fsSL https://frugal.sh/install | bash
frugal mcp install

The first command drops the binary in your $PATH. The second auto-detects Claude Desktop, Cursor, AnythingLLM, and Claude Code and merges frugal into each configured MCP server list.

AnythingLLM

frugal mcp install finds AnythingLLM Desktop on its own and merges frugal into /plugins/anythingllmmcpservers.json. For a self-hosted or Docker AnythingLLM, point the installer at that instance's storage directory (the same path its own STORAGE_DIR uses):

ANYTHINGLLM_STORAGE_DIR=/path/to/anythingllm/storage frugal mcp install --client anythingllm

Restart AnythingLLM, then look for frugal under Agent Skills → MCP Servers. The tools load for agent sessions, so call them from an @agent chat. In Docker, the command path must resolve inside the container — mount the frugal binary in, or run frugal mcp serve --http on the host and register it as a streamable server instead.

Try it now (no keys)

Search and extract work out of the box: Marginalia (free index of the indie / non-commercial web), Wikipedia (free Wikimedia REST search), and go-readability (free, pure-Go local extractor) ship enabled with zero configuration. This is the default cheap policy at work — free and local rungs first, failover when a provider comes up empty. Captured from a live zero-key run:

frugal__search {"query": "AI agent framework comparison", "max_results": 3}

  stderr › search zero hits; falling back  provider=marginalia latency_ms=529
  result › {
    "provider_used": "wikipedia",
    "cost_usd": 0,
    "latency_ms": 954,
    "results": [
      {"title": "Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_Enterprise_Agent_Platform", ...},
      {"title": "Perplexity AI", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI", ...},
      {"title": "Agentic commerce", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agentic_commerce", ...}
    ]
  }

Honest limits: Marginalia is genuinely good for essays, docs, blogs, and niche technical writing, and weak on mainstream news and product pages; Wikipedia covers entities and reference topics. Zero-key mode is a real workflow for research and local extraction — it is not a Google-grade SERP. One env var changes that: SEARXNGURL (free, self-hosted) or SERPERAPI_KEY ($0.001/call) gives the chain a stronger rung to fall to.

Routing policies

Declare per capability how the provider chain is ordered, in ~/.frugal/config/models.yaml:

routing:
  search:
    strategy: fast            # cheap (default) | fast | premium
    deny: [youcom]            # never called — not by fallback, not even pinned
  extract:
    order: [firecrawl, goreadability]  # explicit preference; unlisted providers still fall back

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.