MFG Calcs

Give every app and AI agent a manufacturing brain.

Give apps and AI agents 5,000+ calculators, manufacturing data, tariff intelligence, sourcing optimization, forecasts, and verifiable answers. Keyless.

About this page

  • The MFG Calcs calculation engine is machine-callable: a free, keyless JSON API at /api/calc lets scripts, spreadsheets, and integrations search the catalog of 5,000+ manufacturing calculators, inspect a calculator's declared inputs and documented defaults, and run it with labeled, unit-carrying results. The published interface description is /openapi.json and the curated index is /llms.txt.
  • AI agents connect through the MCP server at /api/mcp (streamable HTTP, no key required). The first call is the standard initialize handshake; tools/list then enumerates the tool surface, including search_calculators, get_calculator, and run_calculator backed by the same tested formula engine as the site, plus ask for a scoped, sourced answer to a natural-language question and get_forecast for statistical projections.
  • Every ask response carries an explicit outcome (answered, needs-input, needs-clarification, invalid-input, unsupported, or related-resource) with a fulfilled flag, so a client can tell a completed result from a request for missing inputs or an out-of-scope subject. An unsupported dimension is named in unsupportedAttribute instead of being guessed at.
  • Pass the opaque context token from any reply back unchanged on the next turn to keep the confirmed subject, period and calculator inputs, to continue a partial calculation, or to correct a value; corrections are revalidated, and an invalid correction blocks that field rather than reusing the old value.
  • Live data states its period and freshness rather than implying currency, and ?asOf= recovers any vintage-tracked reading as it stood on a past date. Every calculator also ships as an Excel workbook at /api/workbook/<slug>.xlsx, returned by describe responses as the canonical download URL.
  • Use is free with attribution (CC BY 4.0): each response includes the canonical calculator URL to cite. Requests are throttled at roughly 120 per minute per client on a best-effort basis.

Related manufacturing topics

  • manufacturing API
  • manufacturing MCP server
  • tariff API
  • manufacturing calculator API

Last reviewed 2026-08-28.