- Who is this badge for?
- Any project that calls our MCP server (@gitdealflow/mcp-signal), the public signals JSON, or the dataset API. AI agents, dashboards, side-projects, fund-internal tools — if you read our data, you can wear the badge.
- Do I need permission?
- No. The badge is CC BY 4.0 with attribution baked into the SVG title and the embed URL. Drop it in, no DM required. If you tell us you shipped it, we'll feature you on /mirrors.
- Will the badge break my README?
- GitHub renders all README images through its camo proxy, which caches the SVG aggressively (24h CDN, hourly ETag revalidation). The endpoint always returns a valid SVG — even on transient errors, it returns a neutral pill rather than a broken-image icon.
- What's the cache policy?
- Cache-Control: max-age=300, s-maxage=86400, stale-while-revalidate=604800. Static SVG with a fixed ETag. Hundreds of badges on a single page hit the same cache after the first paint.
- Can I customize the label?
- Yes — append ?label=your+label (max 40 chars) to override the left-hand label text. Variant controls the right-hand value: default, compact, or long.
- Is the MCP server free forever?
- Yes. The six tier-zero tools — get_trending_startups, search_startups_by_sector, get_startup_signal, get_signals_summary, get_scout_receipts, get_methodology — are free with no signup, no rate limit, no telemetry. New paid tools may ship later, but these six stay free.