Compare Cloud Costs

Compare Cloud Costs — MCP Server

A standalone Model Context Protocol server that gives your AI assistant access to the Compare Cloud Costs pricing catalog — cloud and AI model pricing across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, DigitalOcean, Alibaba, Cloudflare and the frontier AI providers, aligned to the FinOps FOCUS™ standard.

Data freshness: CCC refreshes its pricing information about once a week. The catalog is not real-time or live data, so use it for planning and comparison rather than minute-by-minute price checks.

This package is the installable, stdio-transport MCP server. Tool names and schemas match the canonical catalog used by the Compare Cloud Costs backend, and every tool is backed by the site's real public APIs — no sample data.

Tools

Tool	What it does
compare_cloud_pricing	Query and compare multi-cloud compute, database, and serverless pricing across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, DigitalOcean, Alibaba, and Cloudflare. Filters: category (required), provider, min_vcpu, min_ram_gb, region.
search_ai_models	Search token pricing (input, output, prompt caching) and context windows for AI LLMs across OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta Llama, and Cohere. Filters: provider, model_family.
estimate_workload_architecture	End-to-end multi-cloud monthly cost benchmarks for realistic full-stack architectures (VMs + managed DB + load balancers + storage + egress). Takes a workload_id (see below).
lookup_datacenter_compliance	Checks global data center availability and region locations from the pricing catalog, with pointers to certification details. Filters: compliance_standard, country_or_city.

Workload IDs

estimate_workload_architecture accepts the workload slugs from https://comparecloudcosts.com/workloads, e.g. 3-tier-web, serverless-web-app, rag-ai-app, k8s-app-platform, ecommerce-microservices, streaming-analytics, data-warehouse-bi, ml-training-hosting, agentic-ai-swarm. (The example slugs in the tool description — three-tier-web-app, ai-rag-pipeline, etc. — predate the current catalog; if an ID is unknown the tool returns the list of valid IDs.)

Get a free API key

Tool calls need a free Compare Cloud Costs API key:

1. Go to https://comparecloudcosts.com/mcp and click Generate preview key (1-click, no card). Keys look like ccc_live_….
2. Set it as the CCC_API_KEY environment variable in your MCP client config (see below).

tools/list works without a key; tools/call returns an error explaining how to get one. Free preview keys are rate-limited per hour (the remaining quota is reported in tool responses).

Install

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json (macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json; Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "compare-cloud-costs": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@comparecloudcosts/mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "CCC_API_KEY": "ccc_live_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or a project .cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "compare-cloud-costs": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@comparecloudcosts/mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "CCC_API_KEY": "ccc_live_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

VS Code

Add to .vscode/mcp.json (note VS Code uses the servers key):

{
  "servers": {
    "compare-cloud-costs": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@comparecloudcosts/mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "CCC_API_KEY": "ccc_live_your_key_here"
      },
      "type": "stdio"
    }
  }
}

Requires Node.js ≥ 18.

How the tools map to the real API

All pricing data comes from GET https://comparecloudcosts.com/api/v1/pricing with header X-API-Key: <CCC_API_KEY> (documented in the "Public API" section of https://comparecloudcosts.com/docs). The endpoint is a faceted filter over the pricing database; the mappings below follow its server-side filter semantics exactly.

compare_cloud_pricing

Tool argument	API parameter	Notes
category	product	The API has no category filter that accepts these values — its category parameter matches per-record labels like "General purpose". The category lens is the product parameter: vm→compute, database→database, serverless→serverless, storage→storage, ai→ai, gpu→gpu, containers→containers, app-hosting→app-hosting. (The API also special-cases gpu to GPU instances only, and compute to non-GPU.) Skipping this mapping would silently default every query to compute.
provider	provider	Provider slugs pass through unchanged (aws, azure, gcp, …).
min_vcpu	minVcpu	Numeric minimum.
min_ram_gb	minMemory	Numeric minimum, GB.
region	geography	The API has no region-slug parameter. Region IDs (us-east-1, eu-west-1, sa-east-1), Azure location names, and place names are translated to the API's geography buckets (north america, south america, europe, asia pacific, middle east & africa). Bucket values are sent lowercase — the API compares them against LOWER(geography) without lowercasing its input (verified against the production API). global/empty means no geography filter. Unrecognized strings pass through.

Results are ordered by price ascending (cheapest first) by the API. The server requests a 500-record page and returns the total count plus the 50 lowest-priced records, trimmed to the comparison-relevant fields.

search_ai_models

product=ai plus provider (passed through) and model_family → the API's free-text search parameter. Records are returned with their attributes (modality, model tier, etc.); token prices are per the record's unit (typically per 1M tokens).

estimate_workload_architecture

Wired to the site's real estimator: POST https://comparecloudcosts.com/api/workloads with { "workloadId": "<id>" }, which returns per-provider monthly totals and a component breakdown (instance types, quantities, monthly prices) computed from catalog pricing records (refreshed about once a week). The tool returns those totals and components as-is. Unknown IDs return the API's "Workload not found" plus the list of valid IDs — numbers are never invented.

All 40 site architecture templates are supported:

Workload Name	Canonical Slug	Description
Serverless Fallback & Resiliency Buffer	serverless-fallback-buffer	A resilient middleware buffer placed in front of serverless functions. Catches traffic spikes or cold-start timeouts by queuing requests into a persistent queue, caching session state, and dispatching to a failover VM worker pool.
AI Gateway, Guardrails & Caching Proxy	ai-gateway-proxy	An enterprise middleware proxy positioned between internal applications and external LLM vendors. Enforces prompt security guardrails (WAF), performs semantic prompt caching, rate-limits tenant requests, and manages API keys securely.
Enterprise API Gateway & Auth Middleware	api-rate-limiting-auth-gateway	A standalone security & integration middleware layer placed in front of legacy or internal microservices to handle OAuth token validation, IP rate-limiting, TLS termination, and traffic shaping.
Cross-Cloud Event Router & Message Broker	cross-cloud-event-router	A cross-cloud middleware layer connecting disparate applications across AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments, converting event schemas and guaranteeing asynchronous delivery.
RAG AI Application	rag-ai-app	A generative AI application using a Foundational Model connected to a Vector Database to search proprietary documents and return grounded answers.
Containerized API via Load Balancer (ALB + Containers)	container-api-alb	Exposes a containerized orders & payments API directly behind an internet-facing Application Load Balancer (Client → ALB → Managed Containers → Database) without an API Gateway. ALB handles path-based routing (/orders, /payments), target group health checks, traffic distribution, TLS termination, and native OIDC/JWT verification.
Serverless HTTP API (HTTP Gateway + Functions + NoSQL)	serverless-http-api	A lean, low-cost serverless API pattern (Client → HTTP API Gateway → Serverless Functions → Managed NoSQL) featuring a native JWT authorizer, stage- and route-level throttling, and built-in CORS — with no load balancer or idle compute to provision.
External Partner API (REST Gateway + Internal ALB + Containers)	external-partner-rest-api	A managed external partner API architecture (Partner → REST API Gateway → VPC Link V2 → Internal ALB → Managed Containers → Database). Combines REST API keys, per-client usage plans and quotas, request validation/transformation, and direct WAF integration at the edge with an internal ALB for private container health checks and traffic distribution.
Serverless Web Application	serverless-web-app	A scalable, low-maintenance backend without provisioning servers. Perfect for event-driven web and mobile backends.
Classic 3-Tier Web Architecture	3-tier-web	The foundational blueprint for monolithic or traditionally scaled web applications using VMs and relational databases. The deliberate minimal baseline.
Real-time Streaming Analytics	realtime-streaming-analytics	A highly demanded architecture for processing IoT telemetry, clickstreams, or financial data in real time.
E-Commerce Microservices Stack	ecommerce-microservices	A resilient, decoupled architecture designed for high availability, fast product lookups, and fault tolerance.
ML Training & Hosting	ml-training-hosting	A pipeline for training machine-learning models on GPU clusters and serving them through a managed inference endpoint.
Kubernetes App Platform	k8s-app-platform	A general-purpose container platform for running microservices and stateful applications on managed Kubernetes.
HPC / Scientific Computing	hpc-scientific	A high-performance computing cluster for simulations, modeling, and batch scientific workloads.
SaaS on Managed Platform	saas-paas-app	A multi-tenant SaaS product running on a managed application platform (PaaS) with a relational backend.
Data Warehouse & BI	data-warehouse-bi	A cloud data warehouse feeding business-intelligence dashboards, fed by an ETL pipeline.
11-Layer Defense-in-Depth Production Architecture (Multi-AZ Analytics & Containers)	defense-in-depth-analytics-platform	A production-grade 11-layer, Multi-AZ architecture demonstrating defense-in-depth from edge to data layer: Edge DDoS/DNS/TLS/GuardDuty/KMS, Layer-7 WAF, dual public ALBs (Shiny & RStudio), private ECS Fargate + EC2 Auto Scaling container fleets with outbound egress filtering, PrivateLink VPC isolation, SFTP (Transfer Family) + direct S3 ingestion, DataSync, shared EFS storage, and serverless SQL analytics (Athena via JDBC).
Disaster Recovery (Warm Standby)	disaster-recovery	A cross-region warm-standby environment that can take over if the primary region fails.
Content & Media Platform	content-media-platform	A video/media platform that transcodes uploads and delivers content globally through a CDN.
Compliance-Ready Web Application	compliance-ready-web-app	A 3-tier web app hardened with managed security services for teams in regulated industries handling sensitive data. Security add-ons scale with the Security slider.
RAG AI Knowledge Base	rag-ai-knowledge-base	A retrieval-augmented generation pipeline for AI chat and search — document storage, a metadata store, an API layer, embeddings, orchestration, and a managed inference endpoint. Supports BYOC vs Managed deployment models.
Smart Manufacturing (IIoT)	smart-manufacturing	An Industrial IoT (IIoT) platform for real-time sensor analytics — edge collection, stream ingestion, live metrics storage, historical analytics, and predictive maintenance.
Event-Driven Image Processing	event-driven-image-processing	An event-driven architecture that processes uploaded images (e.g., ID verification, insurance claims) by triggering serverless functions to run AI vision models and store the extracted metadata.
Hybrid Cloud Network Backbone	hybrid-cloud-network	A robust networking architecture connecting on-premises data centers to cloud resources via dedicated connections and secure gateways.
Zero-Trust Enterprise Edge	zero-trust-edge	A secure, global entry point that strictly authenticates all users and devices, mitigating bots and edge threats before traffic hits the application.
Event-Driven API Backend	event-driven-api	An agile, fully serverless microservices backend combining managed API gateways, message queues, and rapid cache lookups.
Voice AI Assistant	voice-ai-assistant	A speech-to-speech AI pipeline — incoming audio is transcribed, interpreted by a conversational LLM, and answered with a synthesized voice reply. Showcases how AI modality (Audio vs. Chat) and capability tier (Frontier vs. Standard) drive different AI product rows within one architecture.
Autonomous Agent Swarm	agentic-ai-swarm	A distributed multi-agent system where specialized AI agents autonomously collaborate, route tasks via message queues, and share transient state in memory.
Distributed Saga & Compensating Workflows	saga-orchestrated-ecommerce	Coordinates multi-service distributed transactions (e.g. Order → Payment → Inventory) using an orchestrator state machine. When a downstream step fails (such as stockout), automatically triggers compensating undo actions (payment refund, order cancellation) without distributed locks.
Transactional Outbox & Stream Relay	transactional-outbox-cdc	Guarantees reliable dual writes between relational databases and event brokers. Orders and outbox events commit in a single ACID transaction, while a dedicated Change Data Capture (CDC) worker stream-relays messages to the event bus with zero message loss.
Partitioned Pub/Sub with Consumer Groups	partitioned-pubsub-consumer-groups	Scales event-driven task distribution across independent downstream systems (Email, Inventory, Analytics). Hash-keyed partitioning preserves strict per-entity ordering while competing consumer groups scale throughput horizontally with Redis idempotency guards.
CQRS & Event Sourcing Architecture	cqrs-event-sourcing	Separates write commands from read queries for optimal scaling and zero-data-loss auditability. Changes are recorded to an append-only event store, and asynchronous projection stream workers continuously update read-optimized materialized views.
CDC-Driven Cache Invalidation & Event Sync	cdc-cache-invalidation	Eliminates cache-aside race conditions, app-crash inconsistencies, and stale data by tailing database Write-Ahead Logs (WAL/binlog) via Change Data Capture (CDC). Stream events are consumed by an event-driven worker that evicts or refreshes affected keys directly in a distributed in-memory cache.
Multi-Tier Layered Caching Architecture	multi-tier-caching-web-stack	A high-throughput, latency-optimized web stack employing a 3-tier caching hierarchy: Edge CDN (static assets & public HTTP caching), container in-process micro-cache (L1 with jittered TTLs), and a shared distributed cache (L2 Redis/Valkey cluster with stampede mutex locks) shielding transactional database read replicas.
Customer Portal	customer-portal	A secure customer-facing portal — authenticated sign-in, edge protection, serverless APIs for spiky traffic, core services on Kubernetes, orders and payments with compensating workflows, managed relational + NoSQL data.
Kubernetes Ingress & API Gateway	kubernetes-ingress-gateway	Managed Kubernetes cluster fronted by an API Gateway / Ingress Controller (TLS termination, path routing, and JWT validation), distributing traffic to microservices pods.
Remote MCP Server	remote-mcp-server	An enterprise front door hosting Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers behind an edge CDN/gateway with mTLS/OAuth authentication, serverless or container compute, and tool call routing across providers.
LLM Inference Serving	llm-inference-serving	Production-scale LLM inference cluster pairing vLLM/TensorRT-LLM GPU worker pools with KV-cache-aware load balancing (prefix hash routing), priced both per instance hour and per completed 1K-token request.
Ephemeral CI/CD Runner Platform	ephemeral-ci-cd-runners	Dynamic autoscaling build fleet running on preemptible/Spot capacity (Docker Autoscaler/Fleeting) across x86_64 and ARM64 architectures, scaling strictly to zero between jobs and framed per build.

Backward Compatibility & Aliases

Every slug accepted previously by the MCP server remains functional via automatic alias resolution:

• streaming-analytics → mapped to realtime-streaming-analytics
• three-tier-web-app & three-tier-web → mapped to 3-tier-web
• ai-rag-pipeline → mapped to rag-ai-app
• high-throughput-api → mapped to container-api-alb
• batch-processing → mapped to hpc-scientific

lookup_datacenter_compliance

Regional availability is computed from the site's facets endpoint, GET https://comparecloudcosts.com/api/facets?product=compute[&geography=…] (the same endpoint that powers the website's filter sidebar), which returns catalog-wide record counts per geography and per provider with proper faceted-search semantics. This is deliberately not derived from a sample of pricing records — the pricing endpoint returns records cheapest-first, which badly under-reports non-US geographies.

Honest limitation: per-datacenter compliance certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, GDPR) are not exposed by any public API — the pricing records carry no certification fields. When a compliance_standard is requested, the tool says so explicitly and points to https://comparecloudcosts.com/datacenters and https://comparecloudcosts.com/compliance instead of fabricating coverage.

Also note: at the time of writing, the catalog's geography tagging for compute records is concentrated in North America (with a small Asia Pacific set), so geography-filtered queries for other regions may return zero records. That is the catalog's real coverage, reported as-is.

Development

npm install
npm run build
npm start            # stdio server on dist/index.js
node test/smoke.mjs  # optional smoke test (set CCC_SMOKE_KEY to include API calls)

Registry / directory files

• server.json — official MCP Registry manifest (com.comparecloudcosts/mcp-server); the matching mcpName field is in package.json, as the Registry requires.
• glama.json — Glama ownership-claim file (maintainer: the repository owner).

License

MIT

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© 2026 Cosell Plus LLC. Compare Cloud Costs™ is a product of Cosell Plus LLC. All rights reserved.