onthecheap-mcp

Find free and cheap things to do in a US city — daily event listings with times, prices and venues, plus searchable deals, festivals, kids activities and local guides from the On the Cheap network (Charlotte, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus, Seattle, Kansas City, South Florida, Orlando, Portland, Richmond, Southern Maine, the Triangle). Use when the user asks what's happening locally, wants free or cheap things to do on a date or weekend, or asks about local deals, festivals, or family activities.

On the Cheap

Reads the On the Cheap network — local guides to free and cheap things to do across ~14 US cities. Everything is read-only and needs no credentials.

Always name the city

Every tool except otc_list_sites takes a required site argument, and there is no default. Pick the key that matches the city the user means; if you're not sure one exists, call otc_list_sites first. Common aliases work (milehigh, raleigh, rva, kc, southflorida).

An unknown key is refused with the valid ones listed, so you'll never silently read the wrong city — but do check that the key you picked is the city the user actually asked about. Every result echoes back site and site_name.

Because the whole network is reachable, you can answer across cities in one go — comparing a weekend in Denver and Portland is just two calls.

Category and location ids are per-site. Each site is a separate WordPress install, so an id from otc_list_categories is only meaningful against that same site. Reusing one across cities filters to something unrelated rather than erroring.

The national site (Living On The Cheap) covers US-wide deals and has no local events calendar. The event tools reject it with an explanatory error; use otc_search_posts with site: "national" for national deals.

Picking the right tool

• What's on for a date → otc_list_events with an ISO date (defaults to today). Each listing has its time, price and venue. Add free_only: true for no-cost listings only.
• Scan or compare a whole month → otc_events_month_overview.
• Find articles by topic, place or text → otc_search_posts (query, category, location, after/before, view?).
• Read one article in full → otc_get_post with an id, slug, or URL.
• Discover filter ids → otc_list_categories, otc_list_locations.
• Find which cities exist → otc_list_sites (the only tool with no site).

Typical flow

Pass site on every one of these calls.

For "what's free this weekend?", call otc_list_events once per date with free_only: true — the events calendar is per-day, so a weekend is two calls (three over a long weekend). Give the user the title, time and venue, and offer otc_get_post on anything they want details for.

For a topic ("free museum days", "kids stuff in Lake Norman"), search instead: resolve the category or location id first if you need to filter — against the same site — then otc_search_posts.

Response shape (view)

otc_search_posts takes view: "compact" | "full", and compact is the default — you get the slim shape without asking. It is the only tool here that takes one; the other seven are covered at the end of this section.

Compact projects each result down to the fields a caller ranks or browses on: id, slug, date (the day, not the timestamp), url, title, excerpt (plain text, capped at 280 characters), image, categories, locations, and expired. What it drops is the rendered content body — roughly 20 KB of HTML per post, on a page of up to 100 of them. Compact also narrows the WordPress _fields query parameter to that same list, so the cheap rung is cheap on the wire and not merely in the response; view: "full" is a bigger request, not just a bigger answer.

Two things about the rungs that will surprise you if you don't know them:

• expired exists only on compact. Retired deals are not deleted, they are recategorised — so telling a dead offer from a live one means knowing the site's expired category id, and that id differs on every install in the network (2, 3, 4, 379, … 16289). Compact resolves it per site and hands you the boolean. full gives you categories as bare numeric ids and no way to read them without a second lookup.
• full is untouched WordPress, entities and all. Titles and excerpts come back HTML-encoded (Bashes — free supplies) and content.rendered is raw markup, because the entity decoding and the HTML-to-text pass live in the projection. Full costs you legibility as well as bytes; reach for it when you need a field compact dropped, not as a general "give me everything".

There is deliberately no raw rung: full already returns the upstream records unprojected, so a third value would silently alias one that exists.

The seven tools with no view each have a reason, and none of them is an oversight:

• otc_get_post — its product is the article body. A projection would delete the thing you called it for. Its size knob is format instead: readable plain text by default, "html" for the original markup.
• otc_list_events, otc_events_month_overview — the events calendar is not JSON. It is scraped out of server-rendered HTML into a six-field listing (title, url, time, price, venue, is_free), so there is no fat upstream payload to project away.
• otc_list_categories, otc_list_locations — WordPress terms, four fields apiece (id, name, slug, count). The ids are what you came for.
• otc_list_sites — a fixed table of the network, shipped in the server.
• otc_healthcheck — a connectivity verdict.

Two behaviours to get right

Month overviews are previews. The calendar renders at most four listings per day. In otc_events_month_overview, each day's events is a preview while total is the day's real count — for one August that was 124 previewed against 510 actual. Use total when telling the user how much is on, and call otc_list_events for a date to get that day's full schedule. Never present the preview as the complete list.

Expired deals are hidden by default. Retired offers are parked in an expired category and excluded from searches, so results reflect things still available. Only pass include_expired: true when the user is explicitly researching past deals or history — and say so when those results are shown, since the offers no longer stand.

Dates

Pass dates as ISO YYYY-MM-DD (and months as YYYY-MM). The tools convert to whatever the site expects and reject a malformed date rather than guessing. Resolve relative dates ("this Saturday") against today before calling.