The tool catalog is readable by machines as well as by people. There is no account, no API key and no sign-up: the two examples below work if you paste them into a terminal right now. This page is the short version; the full list of endpoints lives on the developer reference.
Search takes a plain description of the job rather than a tool name, which is usually what you have. Every result carries the page URL, an embeddable URL, and a runsInBrowser flag saying whether that tool would send a file to a server.
curl "https://toolsmonk.com/api/public/search?q=make+a+pdf+smaller&limit=2"{
"query": "make a pdf smaller",
"count": 2,
"results": [
{
"slug": "compress-pdf",
"name": "Compress PDF",
"category": "pdf-tools",
"url": "https://toolsmonk.com/tool/compress-pdf",
"runsInBrowser": true
}
]
}Responses are CORS-enabled, so this works from a browser as well as from a server. They carry rate limit headers, which is worth reading rather than backing off blindly.
The Model Context Protocol server lets an assistant search the catalog itself and hand the person it is helping a working link, rather than guessing a URL. It exposes 5 tools and 3 resources, all read-only: it processes no files, writes nothing and issues no session.
Most MCP clients take a block like this in their configuration file. The exact key names differ between clients, so check yours, but the endpoint and the transport are the same everywhere.
{
"mcpServers": {
"toolsmonk": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://toolsmonk.com/api/mcp"
}
}
}Most tools do their work inside the visitor's own browser, so a file never reaches us. A small number do send input to a server. Every catalog record carries runsInBrowser derived from that one list, so an agent can warn somebody before their data goes anywhere, and there is a machine-readable disclosure of the whole split if you want to surface it yourself.
An OpenAPI description, an RFC 9727 API catalog, agent skills, the category endpoint and the two llms.txt documents are all listed on the developer reference, with what each one is and what it returns. If something there does not resolve or answers surprisingly, write to support@toolsmonk.com.