Answer · for AI agents and their humans
Free MCP Server with No API Key
GitDealFlow's MCP server (@gitdealflow/mcp-signal) is fully free, requires no API key, no signup, and no credit card. Six VC-research tools, all read-only, hosted-CDN-cached.
Most useful MCP servers wrap a paid API and ask you to bring your own key — that's fine for production tools but a friction wall for hobbyist agents and casual research. The GitDealFlow MCP server is the opposite: a fully open, no-credentials MCP that returns venture-capital-relevant startup data on first call.
Why no key is needed. The MCP wraps the GitDealFlow public dataset endpoint (/api/signals.json), which is itself unauthenticated and CC-BY 4.0 licensed. There is no GitHub Personal Access Token to provision, no OAuth handshake, no Anthropic / OpenAI key passed through. Just npx @gitdealflow/mcp-signal and the tools light up.
What you can do without paying. All six tools are free: get_trending_startups (top 20 across 20 sectors), search_startups_by_sector (filter by one of 20 sector slugs), get_startup_signal (individual startup lookup), get_signals_summary (dataset freshness), get_scout_receipts (Scout Score for any GitHub user), get_methodology (full methodology document).
The paid tier exists, but it's a different product. A €9.97/month Dashboard tier offers a human-facing UI with filtering, bulk CSV export, and per-sector email alerts. The MCP tools and the underlying API endpoints are not gated by the Dashboard subscription.
Polite limits, not paywalls. The endpoints have origin-side per-IP rate limits to prevent abuse (~30 requests / minute per IP), but no token-bucket throttling on the dataset itself. CDN caches at the edge for 24 hours, so repeated calls are essentially free for everyone involved.
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Install free on npm →Frequently asked questions
Will the free tier disappear if the project gets popular?
No. The five MCP tools (six including Scout receipts) are guaranteed to remain free in perpetuity. New paid features are added on top — they don't extract value from the free surface.
Are there usage limits on the free tier?
There are polite per-IP origin limits (~30 requests / minute) to prevent abuse. There is no token-bucket throttling on the underlying data. CDN caches at the edge for 24 hours, so repeated reads are negligible cost.
Can I use the data commercially?
Yes, with attribution. The dataset is licensed CC-BY 4.0. The required citation is `VC Deal Flow Signal (signals.gitdealflow.com), Q2 2026 data.`