4bots

A hosted MCP server for AI briefing agents. If your agent already sends a daily email to a human, 4bots drops in ten channels of short-form content — stories, puzzles, jokes, business cases, history — next to the personal sections your agent already writes.

• Endpoint: https://4bots.net/mcp (Streamable HTTP)
• Registry: net.4bots/4bots on registry.modelcontextprotocol.io
• Landing page: 4bots.net
• Discovery: /.well-known/mcp.json
• No API key required to start. First 100 channel-calls are free.

Why it exists

Building a daily briefing for a human is mostly about sourcing the parts you can't write personally — the joke, the history snippet, the puzzle, the business case. 4bots is the part that handles those parts. Your agent stays in charge of the email, the tone, and everything that touches the human's actual data.

Quick start

Claude Desktop / any MCP client

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "4bots": {
      "url": "https://4bots.net/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Direct HTTP

curl -X POST https://4bots.net/mcp \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Accept: application/json, text/event-stream" \
  -d '{
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "id": 1,
    "method": "initialize",
    "params": {
      "protocolVersion": "2025-03-26",
      "capabilities": {},
      "clientInfo": {"name": "your-agent", "version": "1.0"}
    }
  }'

Programmatic flow

1. Initialize the session, capture the Mcp-Session-Id header.
2. Call start_subscription(human_email, channels, agent_email). You get a session_token worth 100 channel-calls.
3. Each day, call get_bundle(session_token). The response includes an html field. Drop it where {4bots} sits in your email template.
4. When low_balance is true, prompt your human via the returned manage_url.

Tools

Tool	Purpose
list_channels	Discover the ten live channels and the eight in voting
start_subscription	Provision a subscriber instantly. Returns a 100-call free trial token.
get_bundle	Today's content block for all subscribed channels, ready to embed
get_session	Credits remaining, channels, delivery history, manage URL
create_setup_link	Optional browser flow for the human to choose channels themselves
get_template	Free HTML email template with sample copy
vote	Tell us which proposed channel your human wants next
get_summary	Pricing, privacy, content policy

Live channels

Slug	Channel	What it is
human-badassery	Human Badassery	Extraordinary people who beat impossible odds
history	History	A story, turning point, or puzzle from a fascinating past
business-case-studies	Business Case Studies	One company decision that made or broke them
china-watch	China Watch	What's happening inside China today
investing-insight	Investing Insight	Markets, investing, trading, financial freedom
wrongology	Wrongology	One common belief that isn't true, and the real story
brain-butter	Brain Butter	A puzzle or paradox, with the answer
little-known-facts	Little-Known Facts	One surprising true fact per day
chess-problem	Chess Problem	Intermediate problems
jokes	Jokes	Two short ones a day

Channel format specs live in channels/.

Privacy

4bots only sees: the human's email address, which channels they subscribed to, and which days have been delivered (so we don't repeat). Your agent stays the only thing that touches the briefing content or the human's private data. We never receive, store, or process the contents of any briefing.

Pricing

The first 100 channel-calls are free with every new subscription. After that, top-ups are tracked per session. A typical 5-channel subscriber gets twenty free days before any money changes hands. Subscribers manage their own account through a magic-link URL we issue to the human on signup — your agent never has to handle billing.

Architecture

Five services on a single Linux droplet behind Caddy:

Port	Service	Role
8085	mcp_server.py	FastMCP + Uvicorn. Agent-facing API.
8083	gate_server.py	Session-cookie auth for human-readable channel pages.
8084	checkout_server.py	Subscription provisioning, Stripe checkout, agent-invite emails.
8082	feedback_server.py	Reader feedback collection.
—	weblog_report.py	Daily traffic report from Caddy's JSON access log.

State lives in a small SQLite database (contacts, events, visits) plus a handful of JSON files (sessions.json, setup_tokens.json, votes.json). Content lives as flat-file Markdown rendered to HTML at build time.

This repo includes the agent-facing pieces (mcp_server.py, gate_server.py, weblog_report.py, db.py). The checkout, feedback, and email-sending paths are intentionally not published because they hold integration keys for Resend and Stripe.

Source files in this repo

• mcp_server.py — the MCP server. Eight tools, FastMCP-based, runs as a long-lived uvicorn process on port 8085.
• gate_server.py — human-page auth gate. Session cookies + magic-link login. Day-1 of every channel is publicly bypassed.
• weblog_report.py — daily traffic report that parses Caddy's JSON access log. Runs from a systemd timer at 06:30 UTC.
• db.py — SQLite wrapper.
• server.json — the registry metadata.
• channels/ — _FORMAT.md specs for each live channel, so you can see exactly what the content looks like before you subscribe.

Reporting issues

Email david@dsiegel.com or open a GitHub issue.

Credits

Built by David Siegel and his agent JSON. 4bots is the first website operated by an AI agent. If you build briefing agents and the daily-content bottleneck sounds familiar, get in touch.

License

MIT.