APIMODELS MCP
Unified AI API for developers — 150+ image, video, LLM and audio models via one key; MCP server for APIMODELS.
Documentação
apimodels-mcp
MCP server for apimodels.app — call image, video, LLM chat and text-to-speech models with one API key, from Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP client.
One key unlocks GPT-6.1, Claude, Gemini, GLM, DeepSeek, Qwen, Seedance, Veo, Kling, gpt-image-2, Gemini Image, MiniMax speech and more — billed in USD, you only pay for successful generations.
Fastest setup: the Codex / Claude Code plugin
Coding agents are good at planning — scripts, shot lists, prompts, editing with ffmpeg. The apimodels plugin gives them the part they cannot do: rendering the video, images and voice-over. It bundles this MCP server plus a skill that teaches the agent when to use it, how to pick a model, how to wait for long renders and when to ask before spending.
- Sign in once (needs Node.js 18+):
Your browser opens apimodels.app; click Authorize. A key namednpx -y apimodels-mcp loginCLI · <date>is created for this machine and stored in~/.apimodels/credentials.json, where every client finds it — including desktop apps that do not see your shell's environment variables. Nothing to copy or paste, and the agent can run this step for you. On a machine without a browser use--no-browser(prints the link) or--paste(paste a key from https://apimodels.app/console/api-keys). - Install the plugin.
- Claude Code (2.1.275 or later):
Older versions:/plugin install apimodels --marketplace stimQQ/apimodels-mcp/plugin marketplace add stimQQ/apimodels-mcp, then/plugin install apimodels@apimodels. - Codex:
Only have the Codex desktop app and nocodex plugin marketplace add stimQQ/apimodels-mcp codex plugin add apimodels@apimodelscodexcommand? Usenpx -y @openai/codexin place ofcodex— it runs the official CLI on the fly and shares the app's config. Then restart Codex. Codex asks you to approve each call that spends credits or changes something (the generation tools,chat,review_image,embed,extract_media,jev_decide,upload_asset,delete_asset,clone_voice,delete_voice,write_lyrics); checking progress, the model list, voices, assets and the balance never asks.
- Claude Code (2.1.275 or later):
- Ask in plain words, e.g. "make a 5-second 16:9 video of a kitten slowly raising its head in morning light" or "plan a 20-second product video for this repo and render it shot by shot".
No Node.js yet? Install the plugin anyway and ask for a video: the skill has the agent check for Node.js and, with your OK, install the official LTS for you (winget on Windows, Apple's installer on macOS).
Hosted server: no Node.js, sign in with OAuth
The same tools run at https://api.apimodels.app/mcp (Streamable HTTP). Nothing to install and no key to copy: add the URL to your client and it asks you to sign in to apimodels.app and click Authorize. The access token it gets is a dedicated API key named MCP · <app> · <date>; delete that key in the console to disconnect.
- Codex — add to
~/.codex/config.toml, then runcodex mcp login apimodels:[mcp_servers.apimodels] url = "https://api.apimodels.app/mcp" - Claude Code —
claude mcp add --transport http apimodels https://api.apimodels.app/mcp, then/mcp→ apimodels → Authenticate. - Cline —
cline mcp install apimodels --transport http https://api.apimodels.app/mcp, or in VS Code add{"type": "streamableHttp", "url": "https://api.apimodels.app/mcp"}undermcpServers.apimodelsincline_mcp_settings.jsonand authorize. Step-by-step guide for agents: llms-install.md. - ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Cursor and other clients that take a remote MCP URL — add it as a custom connector with this URL and sign in when asked.
Differences from the local server: the hosted one cannot read files on your machine — the agent calls get_upload_url, uploads the file with curl -T and passes the returned URL instead (local paths are refused with that hint) — and each call waits at most 50 seconds before handing back a task id for get_task. Signed in with a plain API key instead? Send it as Authorization: Bearer sk_….
Tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
get_balance | Your apimodels balance in USD — the agent checks it before a batch. |
list_models | Every model id, grouped by endpoint, with the tool that calls it. |
chat | Chat / text completion with any LLM (gpt-6.1-sol, claude-opus-5-5, gemini-3-pro-preview, …). |
generate_image | Text-to-image and edits, with up to 16 reference images (image_urls), masks and markup images, exact size, n, quality and output_format — including animated GIF (frame_count, frame_duration_ms) and SVG on gpt-image-2.6-flare / -sunburst. Returns the URL(s) plus a preview the model can look at. With doubao-seedream-5-0-flash it can keep a transparent background or split an image into named transparent layers. |
review_image | A vision model critiques an image against your brief and proposes a revised prompt. |
generate_video | Text-to-video, image-to-video, first + last frame, reference images / videos / audio (Seedance), talking avatars and lip sync (image or video + audio_url), motion transfer (image + driving video), upscaling and subtitle removal. |
get_task | Wait for / check on any image, video or audio task that came back as still running. |
text_to_speech | Speech from MiniMax, ElevenLabs (eleven-tts-v3, v4, flash, turbo, multilingual), Fish and Kling voices; returns the audio URL (ElevenLabs can also be saved to a local file). |
list_voices | Search 12,000+ MiniMax, ElevenLabs and Fish voices by language, gender or keyword, the Kling voices for kling-tts, or your own clones (mine: true). Free. |
clone_voice · delete_voice | Clone a voice from an audio sample — MiniMax ($1.41), ElevenLabs (free, kept 24 hours) or Fish (first 20 free) — and delete clones you no longer need. |
generate_audio | Music with suno-v5 (from a description or your own lyrics), sound effects, a soundtrack for a video, multi-speaker dialogue, dubbing into another language, and voice isolation. |
write_lyrics | Draft lyrics, a title and style tags for suno-v5. Free. |
embed | Embedding vectors (text-embedding-3-small / -large). |
extract_media | Direct video / image / audio links, captions and subtitles from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, Bilibili, Douyin, Xiaohongshu and 1000+ other sites; whole profiles and playlists page by page. |
jev_decide | Jev (TypeSafe System One): typed questions about a state, answered with calibrated probabilities. |
upload_asset | Register an image, video or audio file in your asset library and get an asset:// reference to reuse a person or product across video tasks ($0.01). |
list_assets · get_asset · delete_asset | Browse, check and delete library assets. |
get_upload_url | Hosted server only: a 15-minute link to curl -T a local file to; returns its public URL. |
Not exposed: the realtime voice model (grok-voice-3.0, a WebSocket session) — MCP tool calls cannot carry a live audio stream.
Long generations do not get lost
Every generation is asynchronous on apimodels, and video is slow: a median of about 2.5 minutes, 9 in 10 within 8 minutes (production, week to 2026-09-22). Images take about 50 seconds. Meanwhile Codex aborts an MCP tool call after 60 seconds by default, and the MCP SDK's own client timeout is 60 seconds too. A tool that blocks until the video is ready therefore gets killed mid-wait — the task keeps running, the account is billed when it finishes, and the assistant never sees the URL. Versions up to 0.2.x did exactly that.
Since 0.3.0 the generation tools wait at most wait_seconds (default 50) and then return the task id with a "still running" note; the assistant calls get_task, which waits up to another wait_seconds and returns the URL(s) — with the image preview for image tasks — or "still running" again. Nothing is resubmitted and nothing is billed twice. The assistant does this on its own; you just ask for the video.
- Codex: keep the default. Or raise
tool_timeout_secfor this server inconfig.tomland pass a largerwait_seconds. - Claude Code / Claude Desktop / Cursor: no 60-second limit, so
wait_seconds: 600ongenerate_videogets the URL in one call.APIMODELS_WAIT_SECONDS=600in the server's env makes that the default.
The model can check its own work
Ask for an image and let the assistant iterate until it is right — "make a 16:9 banner that says SAVE 10%, check the spelling, fix it if needed":
generate_imagereturns the URL and a preview of the image itself (max 1024px JPEG). Clients that pass tool-result images to the model — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor — let it see what it made. Passreturn_image: falseto skip the preview.review_imageworks everywhere, including clients that show tool-result images to you but not to the model (Cherry Studio is one). It sends the image and your brief to a vision model and returns what matches, what is wrong (garbled text, composition, aspect ratio, artifacts) and a revised prompt. One review costs well under $0.01 on the defaultgpt-5.6-luna.
The assistant picks aspect_ratio and resolution itself from what you ask for, so "make it 16:9" in plain words is enough.
Local files just work
Every input that takes a file — image_url, image_urls, video_url, audio_url, reference lists, source on upload_asset — takes any of these (images and audio up to 10 MB, video up to 100 MB):
- a public
https://…URL — passed through untouched - a local file path —
/Users/me/photo.png,./ref.jpg,~/Pictures/x.webp - a URL on your own machine —
http://127.0.0.1:8000/photo.png,http://localhost:3000/… - a
data:image/png;base64,…URI - an
asset://…reference fromupload_asset— passed through untouched
The last three are uploaded for you first, and the resulting public URL is what gets
generated from. This has to happen here rather than server-side: the file exists only on
your machine, and 127.0.0.1 means our server when our server resolves it — which is why
passing one to the REST API directly fails with private/reserved IP addresses not allowed.
This MCP server runs next to your files, so it can do what our servers cannot.
Uploads land in your account's R2 space and are auto-deleted after 30 days.
Setup
- Run
npx -y apimodels-mcp loginand click Authorize in the browser — or create a key at https://apimodels.app/console/api-keys (it looks likesk_…) and put it in the server's environment asAPIMODELS_API_KEY, as the examples below do. - Add the server to your MCP client.
npx -y apimodels-mcp statusshows which key is in use and your balance.
Claude Desktop
Edit claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config):
{
"mcpServers": {
"apimodels": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "apimodels-mcp"],
"env": {
"APIMODELS_API_KEY": "sk_your_key_here"
}
}
}
}
Restart Claude Desktop. You can now ask it to "generate an image of …" or "make a 5-second video of …".
Cursor
Settings → MCP → Add new MCP server, or add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"apimodels": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "apimodels-mcp"],
"env": { "APIMODELS_API_KEY": "sk_your_key_here" }
}
}
}
Codex CLI
Add to ~/.codex/config.toml:
[mcp_servers.apimodels]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "apimodels-mcp"]
env = { APIMODELS_API_KEY = "sk_your_key_here" }
# Optional. Codex aborts a tool call after 60 s by default; the tools stay under that
# on their own (see "Long generations do not get lost"), so this is only needed if you
# want generate_video to return the URL in one call — then also pass wait_seconds: 600.
# tool_timeout_sec = 660
Two things to know in Codex:
- Approvals. Codex asks you to approve any tool call that is not marked read-only. Since 0.4.3,
list_modelsandget_taskare marked read-only, so waiting on a video no longer prompts on every check (0.8.0 addslist_voices,list_assetsandget_asset); the tools that bill your account or change your asset library still ask once per call. To skip those prompts as well, adddefault_tools_approval_mode = "approve"under[mcp_servers.apimodels]. - Name the tool. Codex loads MCP tools on demand rather than listing them all up front, so say which one you want — e.g. "use apimodels generate_video to make a 5-second 16:9 clip of …". A bare "make me a video" may not make it look.
Cherry Studio
In Settings → MCP Servers, add a new server of type stdio:
- Command:
npx - Arguments:
-y apimodels-mcp - Environment variables:
APIMODELS_API_KEY=sk_your_key_here
Enable the server, then select it for your conversation from the MCP control under the chat box. Use a chat model that supports tool calls (Claude, GPT, Gemini …) as the conversation model — it calls the image model for you. Cherry Studio needs Node.js installed for npx; on Windows install it from https://nodejs.org.
Any other MCP client works the same way — run npx -y apimodels-mcp over stdio with APIMODELS_API_KEY in the environment.
Models, docs and pricing
Everything the tools call is documented on apimodels.app:
- API documentation · pricing · full model catalog
- Image: GPT Image 2.5 API (model page), GPT Image 2 API, Nano Banana 2.1 API (model page), all image models
- Video: Seedance 2.5 API, Google Veo API, MiniMax H3 API, FlashVSR video upscaling
- Chat and speech: LLM API (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, GLM, Qwen), Claude Sonnet 5.5, audio and text-to-speech
- Other ways in: Claude Code setup, chat clients, Agent Skills, free calculators and tools
- Prompt libraries with example outputs: GPT Image 2.5 prompts, GPT Image 2 prompts, Seedance 2.5 prompts, MiniMax H3 prompts
Configuration
| Env var | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
APIMODELS_API_KEY | — | Your sk_… key. Optional when you have run apimodels-mcp login; if both exist, this one wins. |
APIMODELS_CREDENTIALS_FILE | ~/.apimodels/credentials.json | Where apimodels-mcp login saves the key and where the server looks for it. |
APIMODELS_BASE_URL | https://api.apimodels.app/v1 | API base URL. |
APIMODELS_WAIT_SECONDS | 50 | Default wait_seconds for generate_image, generate_video, text_to_speech and get_task: how long a call waits before handing back a task id. Max 900. |
APIMODELS_TIMEOUT_MS | — | Deprecated (0.2.x): the same wait in milliseconds. Still honoured if set. |
Local development
pnpm install
pnpm build
APIMODELS_API_KEY=sk_... node dist/index.js # runs over stdio
License
MIT