API Docs — CostBench Verified Cost-Intelligence API
API Docs — CostBench Verified Cost-Intelligence API
Shortlist

API Docs

Independent SaaS pricing & negotiation intelligence — via API

The same sourced, confidence-scored data behind costbench.com, available as a REST API and an MCP server for 3,297+ products. Free for non-commercial use, attribution required.

3,297+ Products covered
100/day Free-tier call allowance
8 MCP tools
2 License states (owned / restricted)

Endpoints

GET
/api/v2/pricing/{slug}

Full sourced pricing record — tiers, golden depth (hidden costs, contract terms, market data, sentiment, negotiation tips, scenarios, price history, free tier), verification envelope, and a per-field license map.

GET
/api/v2/pricing?slugs=a,b,c

Batch pricing records (max 20). Add ?depth=summary to drop long prose.

GET
/api/v2/coverage?slugs=a,b,c

Per-field availability, source, freshness, and license status for the requested products — check what you can reuse before you build on it.

POST
/api/v2/tco

Total cost of ownership for an N-seat team — deterministic from real tier prices plus sourced benchmark line items.

GET
/api/v2/compare?slugs=a,b

Structured side-by-side comparison of 2–4 products, with a per-field winner and license status.

GET
/api/v2/history/{slug}

Price snapshots, trend, and derived changes over time.

GET
/api/v2/usage/{slug}

LLM/API usage rate card, with an optional cost estimate for a given workload.

GET
/api/v2/discover

Find software by category, max price, or free-tier availability.

GET
/api/v2/openapi.json

OpenAPI 3.1 manifest — point an agent framework at this to auto-onboard the whole API.

POST
/mcp

MCP server (JSON-RPC 2.0, streamable HTTP) — 8 read-only tools backed by the same data as the REST API.

Full request/response schemas: /api/v2/openapi.json. MCP tool list mirrors the REST surface — connect a client to https://costbench.com/mcp.

Data Licensing

Every field group in every response carries a license value — "owned" or "restricted" — so you know what you can build on before you build on it. No field is ever withheld or removed; this is metadata alongside the data, not a paywall.

Owned

Data we extract and verify ourselves — published vendor pricing, our hidden-cost research, negotiation tips, price-history snapshots. Free to cite with attribution.

Restricted 239 products affected

Third-party medians we license for display but not for resale or commercial reuse — today this means Vendr-sourced market data. Flagged with license: "restricted" and a licenseNote on every affected field.

Example: a restricted field looks like {"marketData":{"medianAnnualCost":42000,"sampleSize":82,"source":"Vendr marketplace data"},"license":{"marketData":"restricted"},"licenseNote":"Third-party medians are not licensed for commercial reuse."}

Free Tier

  • 100 calls/day fair-use guideline for sustained use (a separate, stricter technical rate limit of 120 requests/minute per IP exists purely to stop abuse — most integrations never approach either).
  • Attribution required — link back to the CostBench source page (links.page in every response) when you display our data.
  • Non-commercial use — research, agents, internal tooling, and citation by AI assistants are all fine. Reselling our data as your own dataset is not.
  • No API key required today. CORS is open on all v2 endpoints.

Paid Tiers