onthecheap-mcp

MCP server for the On the Cheap network — local guides to free and cheap things to do across 14 US cities. Daily event listings with times, prices and venues, plus a searchable archive of deals and guides.

Developed and maintained by AI (Claude Code). Use at your own discretion.

No credentials required. Every site is public, so the server reads them server-side over plain HTTPS. There is nothing to configure beyond which city you want, and no browser extension involved.

Install

npx onthecheap-mcp

Or as a Claude Code plugin:

/plugin marketplace add chrischall/onthecheap-mcp
/plugin install onthecheap-mcp

Choosing a city

One server reads the whole network. Every tool takes a site argument naming the city to read — there is no default and no configuration step:

Key	Site	Area
charlotte	Charlotte On The Cheap	Charlotte, NC
denver	Mile High on the Cheap	Denver, CO
atlanta	Atlanta on the Cheap	Atlanta, GA
chicago	Chicago on the Cheap	Chicago, IL
columbus	Columbus on the Cheap	Columbus, OH
seattle	Greater Seattle on the Cheap	Seattle–Tacoma
kansascity	Kansas City on the Cheap	Kansas City
miami	South Florida on the Cheap	Miami / Broward / Palm Beach
orlando	Orlando on the Cheap	Orlando, FL
portland	Portland Living on the Cheap	Portland, OR
richmond	RVA on the Cheap	Richmond, VA
southernmaine	Southern Maine on the Cheap	Southern Maine
triangle	Triangle on the Cheap	Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill
national	Living On The Cheap	US-wide deals (no local events calendar)

Common aliases work too — milehigh, raleigh, rva, kc, southflorida. otc_list_sites reports the same list.

site is required rather than defaulted on purpose: a server that quietly fell back to one city would answer a question about Denver with Charlotte's data and give no sign anything was wrong. An unknown key is refused with the valid ones listed.

Tools

All tools are read-only. Every tool except otc_list_sites takes a required site argument. The two event tools reject national, which has no local events calendar — it is still searchable via the other tools.

Tool	What it does
otc_list_events	Everything on a given day — time, price, venue. free_only filters to no-cost listings. Defaults to today.
otc_events_month_overview	Day-by-day counts for a month, to find the busiest days. Each day's list is a preview; total is the real count.
otc_search_posts	Search articles by text, category, location and date range. Returns slim summaries by default.
otc_get_post	One article in full, as readable text or raw HTML. Accepts an id, slug, or URL.
otc_list_categories	Category ids and post counts, for filtering searches by topic.
otc_list_locations	Local area ids and post counts, for filtering geographically.
otc_list_sites	The cities in the network and their site keys. Takes no arguments.
otc_healthcheck	Confirm one site is reachable.

Examples

What's free in Charlotte this Saturday?

Find kids' events in Lake Norman in August

Compare free things to do in Denver and Portland next weekend

Two things worth knowing

Retired deals are excluded by default. Each site parks expired offers in an expired category, so searches skip them and you don't get deals that no longer exist. Pass include_expired: true to search the archive. The category's id differs on every site, so it's resolved by slug at request time — a hardcoded id silently disables the filter elsewhere.

Category and location ids are per-site. Each site is a separate WordPress install, so id 13 is a different category on every one of them. Resolve ids against the same site you then search — an id borrowed from another city will filter to something unrelated rather than error.

Month overviews are previews, with honest counts. The calendar shows at most four listings per day. otc_events_month_overview reports each day's true total alongside the preview — call otc_list_events with a date for the complete schedule.

Configuration

None. The city is a per-call site argument, not an environment variable, so there is nothing to set up before use.

Hosted connector (optional)

The same tools can run as a Cloudflare Worker, making them reachable from claude.ai on the web, desktop and mobile rather than only from a machine with this package installed. Because the sites are public, connecting asks for nothing — the login page is a single "Authorize" button and no credentials are stored. One Worker serves one city.

Releases deploy it automatically — the deploy-connector job in release-please.yml ships the tagged ref via the shared chrischall/workflows reusable workflow. Any ref can also be deployed on demand from Actions → deploy-connector → Run workflow. First-time setup for your own Cloudflare account: see docs/DEPLOY-CONNECTOR.md.

Development

npm install
npm test          # node suite
npm run worker:test   # Workers-runtime suite
npm run build

See docs/OTC-API.md for the verified data surface, including the events calendar's US M-D-YYYY date routing (an ISO date is silently parsed as 1970), the month-view truncation, and why term ids are never hardcoded.

License

MIT