docmcp — Word & Excel files

docmcp

**Live: https://docmcp.onrender.com** — free key at POST /keys/free, 10 docs/month. Paid: $10/mo for 100, $30/mo for 500. Quotas live in PLANS in src/store.ts.

A paid MCP server that turns structured data into real .docx and .xlsx files. Agents are good at prose and bad at file formats — they emit Markdown and hope. This gives them a tool that returns a Word or Excel file with actual headings, tables, bold headers, frozen panes and RTL support.

Returns a short-lived download URL rather than a base64 blob: a 200KB docx inlined into a tool result costs the caller ~70k tokens.

Two modes, one codebase:

• --stdio — local client (Claude Desktop / Code). No auth, no quota, no expiry; files are written to OUT_DIR and the tool returns the path.
• default — hosted HTTP at /mcp. API key required, quota metered, files served as URLs that expire after 24h. This is the product.

Local

npm install

Already registered in Claude Desktop as docmcp (output → ~/Documents/docmcp). To register elsewhere:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "docmcp": {
      "command": "/usr/local/bin/node",
      "args": ["<repo>/node_modules/tsx/dist/cli.mjs", "<repo>/src/index.ts", "--stdio"],
      "env": { "DATABASE_URL": "postgres://…", "OUT_DIR": "<somewhere>" }
    }
  }
}

Absolute paths matter — the client launches with a minimal PATH.

Hosted

npm start          # http://localhost:8787/mcp
curl -X POST localhost:8787/keys/free

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "docmcp": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://your-host/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer dk_..." }
    }
  }
}

Tools

Env

Plans and quotas live in PLANS in src/store.ts.

Deploy

Any Docker host with a Postgres URL. There is no persistent disk requirement: generated files live on the container filesystem and expire in 24h anyway, so a restart only breaks links that were about to die. Everything that must survive — keys, quotas, the IP salt — is in Postgres.

Currently Render (web service, free tier) + Neon (Postgres, free, no expiry). Deliberately two providers: state lives somewhere that isn't tied to whoever is hosting the container this month. Render builds the Dockerfile straight from GitHub.

BASE_URL must be the public URL — it is baked into every download link handed to a client, so getting it wrong produces links to a host that does not exist. You only learn the URL after the first deploy, so set it then and redeploy.

Render's free tier sleeps after 15 minutes idle and takes 30–50s to wake. That is the cost of not having a card on file; fix it by upgrading once a customer pays.

Billing flow

/buy/starter → Stripe Checkout → webhook checkout.session.completed → key issued → customer lands on /success and sees the key there. No email provider needed. customer.subscription.deleted deactivates it. There are no user accounts: the key is the account.

Test

npm test

Covers both generators (including a ragged table row and a / in a sheet name — both things an LLM will send eventually), number preservation through an xlsx round-trip, and that quota stops exactly at the plan limit.

Known gaps

• No PDF. Good PDF output needs headless Chrome or LibreOffice, which triples the deploy. Word and Excel are the actual gap — everyone already ships Markdown→PDF. Add it when a paying user asks.
• A lost key cannot be recovered. It is shown once on /success. Add email delivery or a "resend by email" route when the first customer asks.
• Files are on the container filesystem. Deliberate — see Deploy. Move to object storage only if 24h links breaking on restart ever actually bothers someone.
• Free keys are rate limited, not abuse-proof. One per IP per 24h plus a global daily ceiling (FREE_KEYS_PER_DAY, default 200). Rotating VPNs still defeats it — nothing stops that, and no free tier anywhere survives a determined attacker. The limits exist to bound the worst case, not to eliminate it.
• /admin needs ADMIN_TOKEN. Unset, the route 404s, so an unconfigured deploy never exposes it. Visit /admin?token=….