source-available · byok · any model

Same search. $0 or $0.005.

The same web search costs $0 to $0.005 per call — and agents pick providers by availability, not price. Frugal routes every tool call down the ladder. Free / local first. Paid as fallback. Cost printed on every result. Your keys. No account.

$0-first BYOK Any model

Install → See the rate gap

live zero-key run, uneditedmcp

frugal__search "AI agent framework comparison"

marginalia   0 hits · $0 · 529ms → falling back
wikipedia    3 hits · $0 ✓

{"provider_used":"wikipedia","cost_usd":0,"latency_ms":954}

Capabilities

Every tool call, routed.

Eight capabilities. Three tiers each. Walked left to right — free first, paid as fallback.

Search shipping

Web SERP, routed.

FreeSearXNG · Marginalia · Wikipedia

CheapSerper · $0.001

PremiumYou.com · $0.005

Extract shipping

Page → clean text.

Freego-readability · local

Cheap—

PremiumFirecrawl · $0.001/pg

Browse partial

Headless rendering.

FreePlaywright (planned)

CheapBrowserless · $0.002

PremiumBrowserbase (planned)

Code exec planned

Run untrusted code.

FreeDocker · local

CheapE2B · $0.10/hr

PremiumModal · $0.14/hr

Embeddings planned

Vector encode.

Freenomic, bge · local

Cheap3-small · $0.02/1M

PremiumVoyage-3 · Cohere

Transcribe planned

Audio → text.

Freewhisper.cpp · local

CheapDeepgram · $0.0043/min

PremiumWhisper · $0.006/min

Chat (small) planned

Fast model call.

FreeOllama · LM Studio

Cheap4o-mini · haiku · flash

Premium4o · sonnet

Chat (large) planned

Reasoning model.

FreeKimi K2 · Qwen 72B

Cheap—

Premium4o · opus · pro

The rack-rate gap

The cheapest tools for AI.

Tool prices haven't fallen the way model prices have. You.com is 5× Serper. A Firecrawl scrape costs as much as the gpt-4o-mini call that consumes it. SearXNG, on your machine, is free. Frugal takes the cheapest result — and when a free provider comes up empty, the chain falls through to the next rung instead of handing your agent an empty array.

Capability	free / local	cheap paid	premium paid
Search shipping	SearXNG (self-host), Marginalia, Wikipedia	Serper · $0.001/call	You.com · $0.005/call
Extract shipping	go-readability (local, in-process)	—	Firecrawl · $0.001/page
Browse partial	Playwright + Chromium (planned)	Browserless ~$0.002/unit (30s)	Browserbase (planned)
Code exec planned	local Docker	E2B ~$0.10/hr (2 vCPU)	Modal ~$0.14/hr (+GPU)
Embeddings planned	nomic-embed-text, bge-large (local)	text-embedding-3-small · $0.02/1M tok	3-large, Voyage-3, Cohere
Transcription planned	whisper.cpp (local)	Deepgram Nova · $0.0043/min	OpenAI Whisper $0.006/min, Speechmatics
Chat (small) planned	Ollama / LM Studio (local OSS)	gpt-4o-mini, haiku, gemini-flash	gpt-4o, claude-sonnet
Chat (large) planned	Kimi K2, Qwen 72B (serious local HW)	—	gpt-4o, claude-opus, gemini-pro

Every call prints the decision — capability, provider, cost — in the agent's trace.

The product

One MCP server. That's it.

Agents talk to Frugal via MCP. Two commands. No other surface.

install into every detected agent

$ frugal mcp install
detected: Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code
✓ wrote all three configs.

run as an MCP server

$ frugal mcp serve
frugal__search registered  providers=[marginalia wikipedia]
frugal__extract registered providers=[goreadability]
mcp serve · transport=stdio

The receipt

See what you kept.

Every call lands in a local ledger — ~/.frugal/usage, plain JSONL, never leaves your machine. frugal stats prints the month. Only the call that actually produced your result earns rack credit; fallback attempts and zero-hit whiffs don't inflate the number.

$ frugal stats

frugal receipt · July 2026 (UTC)
────────────────────────────────────────────────
tool      provider            calls         paid
search    marginalia              1      $0.0000
search    wikipedia               1      $0.0000
extract   goreadability           1      $0.0000
────────────────────────────────────────────────
total                             3      $0.0000

same calls at premium rack rate*         $0.0060
you paid                                 $0.0000
────────────────────────────────────────────────
you saved                      $0.0060   (100%)
────────────────────────────────────────────────
* rack rate = list price of each capability's premium
  provider, snapshotted at call time.

Get started

Install

One Go binary. No SaaS. No account. No keys required to start — Marginalia, Wikipedia, and go-readability work with an empty environment. Add SERPER_API_KEY, YDC_API_KEY, FIRECRAWL_API_KEY, BROWSERLESS_TOKEN, or SEARXNG_URL to unlock the paid and self-hosted rungs. Releases are cosign-signed; the installer verifies the checksum before moving the binary into place.

$ curl -fsSL https://frugal.sh/install | bash

From source

$ git clone https://github.com/brainsparker/frugal.git && cd frugal && make build

Add Frugal to your agent

$ frugal mcp install
# auto-detects Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code.
# merges 'frugal' into each detected config. idempotent.

Trust

Built to self-host.

Your keys stay local: API keys never leave your machine. No control plane. No data retention by architecture.
BUSL 1.1 → Apache 2.0: Source-available today. Self-hosting and internal commercial use are permitted. Each release converts to Apache 2.0 four years after publication. License FAQ →