About AI Tools Directory
AI Tools Directory is a remote MCP server for assistants that need to search and shortlist AI tools across industries. Its curated records support filtering by department and pricing, while free-tier details are marked as automatically detected and potentially outdated.
Key features
- 01Free-text search across tool records
- 02Filter by department and pricing
- 03Retrieve a tool's full record
- 04Browse departments and tool counts
- 05Find tools with a free tier
Use cases
- 01Shortlisting tools for a department
- 02Finding freemium tools for a use case
- 03Checking a tool's listed details
MCP support
Exposes search, lookup, filtering, statistics, and dataset resources to MCP clients over Streamable HTTP. The directory contains records sourced from ai.toolboxes.top.
Configuration
Remote servers need no local install. Pick your client, then copy the config or install in one click.
https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcpclaude mcp add --transport http top-toolboxes-ai-tools-directory https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcp{"mcpServers":{"top-toolboxes-ai-tools-directory":{"type":"http","url":"https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcp"}}}Open in Cursor{"servers":{"top-toolboxes-ai-tools-directory":{"type":"http","url":"https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcp"}}}Open in VS Code{"mcpServers":{"top-toolboxes-ai-tools-directory":{"type":"http","url":"https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcp"}}}{"mcpServers":{"top-toolboxes-ai-tools-directory":{"serverUrl":"https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcp"}}}Run commands in a terminal; paste JSON into the client’s MCP config and restart. Servers that need sign-in will prompt on first connect.
Tools
5| Parameter | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | number | No | Max results (default 20, max 100). |
| query | string | No | Free text matched against tool name, description and tags (e.g. "video editing", "invoice"). |
| pricing | enum | No | Filter by pricing tier.free | freemium | paid |
| department | string | No | Department id, e.g. marketing, design, dev, finance, legal, healthcare. Call list_departments for the full list. |
Details
From the project READMEAI Tools Directory — MCP server
A remote MCP server exposing a curated index of 221 AI tools across 21 industry departments, so AI assistants can look up, filter and shortlist tools instead of guessing.
- Endpoint:
https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcp - Transport: Streamable HTTP (JSON-RPC 2.0)
- Auth: none
- Source data: ai.toolboxes.top
Quick connect
Claude Desktop / Claude Code
{
"mcpServers": {
"ai-tools-directory": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcp"
}
}
}
Cursor — .cursor/mcp.json
Same structure as above.
Any client
POST https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top/mcp
Content-Type: application/json
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"my-client","version":"1.0"}}}
Tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
search_ai_tools | Free-text search across names, descriptions and tags; filter by department and/or pricing (free / freemium / paid) |
get_ai_tool | Full record for one tool by name. Exact match first, then fuzzy; returns suggestions when there's no match |
list_departments | All 21 departments with their tool counts |
find_free_ai_tools | Tools with a free tier, filterable by requires_no_credit_card, has_free_plan, has_api_on_free |
directory_stats | Counts, pricing distribution, free-tier coverage |
Resources
| URI | Contents |
|---|---|
aitools://directory | Full dataset as JSON (221 tools) |
aitools://free-tier | Subset with free-tier facts |
aitools://departments | Department list |
Example
{
"jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 2, "method": "tools/call",
"params": { "name": "search_ai_tools", "arguments": { "department": "legal", "pricing": "freemium", "limit": 3 } }
}
**Harvey** — Legal · paid
...
Data quality — please read
- The directory is reliable. Name, URL, department, pricing tier, description and tags are human-maintained and reviewed.
freeTieris NOT verified. It is regex-extracted from vendor pages and has known failure modes: some tools return a login wall instead of a pricing page, and the extractor can't always tell "free tier needs no card" from "paid plans need a card".- The server drops contradictory signals rather than guessing.
- The server's
instructionsrequire any assistant usingfreeTierto tell the user it is auto-detected and may be outdated. - Coverage is ~87% of tools reachable; of those, about half yielded a usable signal.
- A missing
freeTierfield means "no data", not "no free tier."
If you find wrong free-tier data, please open an issue — that's exactly the feedback needed to improve the extractor.
Self-host
The server is a single Cloudflare Worker with no dependencies.
npm install
node build-dataset.mjs # regenerate dataset.json (edit it, or point it at your own data)
npx wrangler deploy
Requires CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID and CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN in the environment — do not commit them.
node test.mjs https://ai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top # 36 end-to-end assertions
To run locally:
npx wrangler dev --port 8791
node test.mjs http://127.0.0.1:8791
Notes on the deployment
workers.devhostnames are blocked by the GFW, so the canonical hostname isai-tools-mcp.toolboxes.top(a Cloudflare custom domain on the Worker).- The endpoint is served directly from a Worker; there is no origin server.
License
Code: MIT. Dataset: CC BY 4.0 — free to use with attribution to ai.toolboxes.top.
Comments
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From what the protocol is to installing your first server, these answers cover most first questions.
An open protocol that defines how AI applications connect to external tools and data in a uniform way. Clients talk to the model; MCP servers provide tools, resources and prompt templates. They exchange standard messages, so one server can be reused by many clients.