auxiliar-mcp

The MCP server that tells your agent which tool to install for a task, and which cloud service to pick for a stack.

Your agent is intelligent but stuck. It doesn't know Surya beats Tesseract by 1.5pp on word accuracy for Brazilian NFS-e invoices. It doesn't know SendGrid killed its free tier. It guesses, installs the wrong thing, and you burn 30 minutes.

auxiliar-mcp gives your agent reproducible eval-backed answers for the two questions it hits most:

1. "What installable tool should I use for task X?" — skills, MCPs, vendor APIs, local binaries — ranked on real-world corpora, via solve_task.
2. "What cloud service should I pick for Y?" — Chrome-verified pricing, risks, compatibility, setup commands for 77 services across 16 categories, via recommend_service.

Install

# Claude Code
claude mcp add auxiliar -- npx auxiliar-mcp

# Or run directly
npx auxiliar-mcp

Tools (8)

| Tool | What it does | |------|-------------| | solve_task | Get the ranked list of installable tools for a job-to-be-done (e.g., pdf-text-extraction-mcp, nfs-e, boleto, receipt-parsing, bookkeeping-ocr) with scorecards, install commands, FAQ, alternatives considered, and methodological caveats. | | list_solve_tasks | Discover every /solve/ task ranking available — slugs, top picks, categories, agent compatibility. | | recommend_service | Picks the best cloud service for your constraints (framework, budget, region, GDPR, edge, lock-in). | | get_pricing | Chrome-verified pricing — including JS-rendered pages agents can't read via WebFetch. | | get_risks | Risk flags, gotchas, recent breaking changes. | | check_compatibility | Warns about known conflicts between services (e.g., Turso + Prisma needs adapter). | | setup_service | CLI commands, signup URLs, env vars, estimated setup time. | | list_services | Browse the full 77-service catalog, filtered by category. |

When to use solve_task

Your agent needs an installable tool (skill, MCP, vendor API, or local binary) and you want a reproducible evaluation, not vibes.

Agent: "I need to extract text from Brazilian NFS-e invoices, boletos, and phone-photo receipts. What should I install?"

→ solve_task(task_slug="pdf-text-extraction-mcp")
  # aliases work too: "pdf", "ocr", "nfs-e", "boleto", "receipt-parsing", "bookkeeping-ocr", "invoice-extraction"

Returns (truncated):
{
  "answer": "Install Surya (pip install surya-ocr + pin transformers<5.0.0). It led our 10-document real-world corpus on word accuracy (76.9%) and layout preservation (7.0/10), free, local. Tesseract 5 runs 14× faster for throughput-critical workflows. Google Document AI wins on phone-photo receipts specifically...",
  "candidates": [
    { "slug": "surya", "rank": 1, "scorecard": {"word_accuracy": 0.769, "layout": 7, "p50_latency_sec": 22.1, "install_friction": 7, "cost_per_10_docs_usd": 0} },
    { "slug": "tesseract", "rank": 2, "scorecard": {"word_accuracy": 0.754, "layout": 5, "p50_latency_sec": 1.6, "install_friction": 3, "cost_per_10_docs_usd": 0} },
    { "slug": "google-document-ai", "rank": 3, "scorecard": {"word_accuracy": 0.697, "layout": 5.7, "p50_latency_sec": 3.8, "install_friction": 7, "cost_per_10_docs_usd": 0.069} }
  ],
  "corpus_summary": "10 real-world documents: native-text PDFs, legal docs, Brazilian corporate-registry scans, NFS-e invoices, boletos, phone-photo receipts.",
  "alternatives_considered": [ /* yescan, Mistral OCR, pdf-reader-mcp — dropped with reasons */ ],
  "faq": [ /* e.g., "Why does all score 0 on the boleto?" */ ]
}

Full page with reproducible commands: https://auxiliar.ai/solve/pdf-text-extraction-mcp/

When to use recommend_service

Your agent needs a cloud service (database, email provider, auth, payments, etc.).

Agent: "I need a database for my Next.js app. Budget is free, deployed to Cloudflare Workers."

→ recommend_service(need="database", framework="nextjs", budget="free", constraints="edge, zero cold starts")

Returns:
{
  "provider": "turso",
  "reason": "Edge-native SQLite with zero cold starts and embedded replicas",
  "pricing": { "free_tier": "5 GB storage, 100 databases" },
  "risks": ["Not PostgreSQL — limited ORM support"],
  "migration_difficulty": "high",
  "cli_install": "brew install tursodatabase/tap/turso",
  "alternatives": [{"provider": "neon", "trade_off": "Has cold starts on free tier"}]
}

Services Covered (77)

Database: Neon, Supabase, Turso, PlanetScale, Render Postgres, AWS RDS, Railway Postgres, Cloudflare D1 Email: Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, AWS SES, Mailgun, Listmonk Auth: Better Auth, Clerk, Auth0, Firebase Auth, Supabase Auth, Auth.js Payments: Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, RevenueCat Deploy: Vercel, Railway, Render, Fly.io Search: Algolia, Typesense, Meilisearch, PostgreSQL FTS CMS: Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, Payload, Keystatic, Directus, Ghost Monitoring: Sentry, Datadog, PostHog, Grafana Cloud, BetterStack, Highlight.io Storage: Cloudflare R2, AWS S3, Uploadthing, MinIO Cache: Upstash Redis, Momento, Dragonfly Queues: BullMQ, Inngest, Trigger.dev, AWS SQS, CloudAMQP Vector DB: Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Chroma LLM APIs: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI, Groq, Together AI, Ollama SMS: Twilio, Vonage, MessageBird Feature Flags: LaunchDarkly, Statsig, Flagsmith, Unleash Cron: Inngest, Trigger.dev, QStash, Vercel Cron, Cloudflare Cron PDF / OCR (via solve_task): Surya, Tesseract 5, Google Document AI

/solve/ Tasks Available

| Slug | Top pick | Corpus | Categories | |------|----------|--------|-----------| | pdf-text-extraction-mcp | Surya | 10 Brazilian docs incl. NFS-e, boleto, phone-photo receipts | pdf-processing, ocr, agent-tools |

More /solve/ rankings added as walkthroughs run. Each page includes its reproducible command so you can re-run the eval yourself.

Data Quality

• /solve/ evals: reproducible corpus + harness + scoring per task. Ground truth is LLM-drafted, human-finalized. Published commands can be re-run locally.
• Cloud-service pricing: Chrome-verified (actual service websites, not training data). Updated through 2026-04.
• Trust scores: 50+ agent runs across 8 iterations; 47 category aliases; 27 compatibility rules.

Constraints You Can Use on recommend_service

| Constraint | Example | |-----------|---------| | Framework | framework: "nextjs", "sveltekit", "fastapi", "express" | | Budget | budget: "free", "cheap", "enterprise" | | Region | region: "eu" | | GDPR | constraints: "GDPR" | | Edge | constraints: "edge, zero cold starts, cloudflare workers" | | Lock-in | constraints: "no vendor lock-in, portable" | | Features | constraints: "branching, webhooks, inbound email" |

Privacy

The MCP server pings auxiliar.ai/api/ on each tool call for analytics. Only query parameters are sent (e.g., ?need=database&framework=nextjs or ?task_slug=pdf-text-extraction-mcp). No personal data, no API keys, no project info. Works offline with bundled data if the ping fails.

Links

• auxiliar.ai — the comparison site with service entries and /solve/ task rankings
• /solve/pdf-text-extraction-mcp — the OCR walkthrough
• GitHub — source + reproducible eval harness under scripts/ocr-walkthrough/

License

MIT