Plan free-tier Trends MCP API budgets

The free Trends MCP tier includes 100 successful requests per month with no card on file. Engineers who map each Get Trends, Get Growth, and Get Top Trends call to a decision tree keep prototypes honest without burning quota on duplicate keywords.

How does request counting change a design doc?

Document the exact payloads before coding. Get Trends and Get Growth both hinge on one source plus keyword pair per billable unit, while Get Top Trends multiplies by feed type and pagination. That distinction matters when a cron job loops across ten feeds each hour. API orchestration trend data outlines larger automation patterns.

What is a safe weekly cadence on the free tier?

Assume four weekly jobs. Each job can run get_growth on eight keywords across Google Search if each keyword uses one call with four presets bundled. That is thirty-two units. Add eight get_top_trends pulls for two feeds twice a week and the total lands under eighty units, leaving slack for manual debugging. Adjust when marketing adds more keywords.

How should agents phrase MCP prompts to avoid duplicate pulls?

Instruct assistants to include "Using TrendsMCP" once per task and to reuse cached JSON attached to the thread. Without that habit, chatty agents may repeat identical get_trends calls. Trends API free summarizes what ships on the unpaid tier for stakeholders who do not read code.

Where do Cursor and Python clients share logic?

Keep a tiny module that wraps POST https://api.trendsmcp.ai/api with the bearer header so both Cursor MCP configs and server-side cron jobs call the same function. The reference snippets on Python trends API mirror the JSON contract documented in the public docs, which reduces drift between environments.

get_trends

Fetch the longest weekly history once per keyword during backlog grooming instead of repeating the call on every ticket update.

get_trends(keyword='vector database', source='google search')

get_growth

Pack every growth window needed for a quarterly review into one get_growth body so the extra presets do not trigger extra billing units.

get_growth(keyword='vector database', source='google search', percent_growth=['30D', '3M', '12M', 'YTD'])

get_top_trends

Limit live feed pulls to the handful of types that actually change operator decisions, paginating only when dashboards display more than the default twenty-five rows.

get_top_trends(type='GitHub Trending Repos', limit=25)

Common questions

Get Trends charges one unit per source plus keyword pair. Get Growth charges one unit per pair even when multiple percent_growth presets ride in the same payload. Get Top Trends charges per feed type and each paginated page of results, so wide sweeps add up fast.
Store JSON responses with the as_of timestamp from live feeds and the latest date from historical series. Re-query only when dashboards cross a freshness threshold or when keywords change.
Upgrade when automated jobs exceed roughly three hundred mixed pulls per month or when always-on alerting needs hourly feeds. Starter and Pro tiers list higher monthly caps on the public pricing page.