Dare

dare-mcp-server

Generate video and images from inside Claude, billed to your own [Dare](https://trydare.com) credits.

Ask Claude for a shot and it makes one — Seedance 2.5, Seedance 2.0, Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0 Pro, Hailuo 2.3 for video, Nano Banana 2, GPT Image 2 and Seedream 5 Pro for stills. No new subscription, no API key to buy: it spends the Dare credits you already have.

> make me a 10 second 720p cinematic shot of rain on a neon Tokyo street, 16:9

Estimated 110 credits (you have 4,280). Generating… Done: https://storage.trydare.com/…/rain-tokyo.mp4

Works with Claude Code, the Claude desktop app, and Cowork.

[!IMPORTANT]

Dare does not publish a developer API. This server talks to the same private endpoint the

Dare web app uses, signed in as you with your own browser session. It works today — every

tool here has been exercised against Dare's live servers, including a generation run to

completion — but Dare can change that contract without notice, and using it may sit outside

Dare's terms of service. Your account, your credits, your call.

---

Install

You need [Node.js](https://nodejs.org) 20 or newer. Check with node --version; if that errors, install the LTS build from nodejs.org (on a Mac, brew install node also works).

Then run one command in your terminal:

npx dare-mcp-server setup

That is the whole install. The wizard:

1. shows you where to find your Dare token (four clicks in your browser),
2. checks it against Dare and prints your credit balance,
3. saves it to ~/.dare-mcp/config.json with owner-only permissions,
4. adds Dare to Claude Code and/or the Claude desktop app for you.

Restart Claude when it finishes. In Claude Code, /mcp should now list dare.

npx dare-mcp setup works too — dare-mcp is a short alias that forwards to the same package.

Claude desktop app, no terminal: download dare-mcp-server-0.2.0.mcpb from the mcpb-0.2.0 release, open it, and paste your Dare token when asked. It is also listed on the official MCP Registry as io.github.avi-aggarwal14/dare-mcp-server.

Step 2 in detail: finding your Dare token

The server signs in as you, using the long-lived Clerk __client cookie from your browser. It mints a fresh 60-second session token for every call, exactly as the Dare web app does.

1. Sign in at https://trydare.com in Chrome, Edge, Arc or Brave.
2. Open DevTools — Cmd+Option+I on macOS, F12 on Windows and Linux.
3. Go to the Application tab → Storage → Cookies → https://clerk.trydare.com. (In Firefox and Safari the tab is called Storage instead.)
4. Find the row named __client and copy its Value — a long string starting eyJ. Copy the value, not the name.
5. Paste it into the wizard. Your terminal will not echo it back.

The cookie is valid for about a year, so this is a one-time step unless you sign out of Dare.

Treat it like a password. It grants full access to your Dare account and can spend your credits. The wizard keeps it in one file with 0600 permissions and deliberately does *not* write it into your Claude config, so your Claude settings stay safe to sync or share.

Prefer to do it by hand?

Claude Code

claude mcp add dare --scope user -- npx -y dare-mcp-server

Claude desktop app — edit the config file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{

"mcpServers": { "dare": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "dare-mcp-server"] } } }

Then quit and reopen the app.

Both of these read your token from ~/.dare-mcp/config.json. If you would rather pass it as an environment variable (CI, containers, a shared machine), set DARE_CLIENT_TOKEN instead — it takes precedence over the stored file. See Configuration.

Running from source

git clone https://github.com/avi-aggarwal14/dare-mcp-server.git

cd dare-mcp-server npm install # builds automatically npm run setup # same wizard

Point Claude at node /absolute/path/to/dare-mcp-server/dist/cli.js instead of npx.

Check it works

npx dare-mcp-server check

Mints a token, reads your balance, lists a few library items. Run it any time the tools start failing — it is the fastest way to tell a stale cookie from a Dare outage.

First things to try

Once Claude has restarted, just ask in plain English:

> how many Dare credits do I have?

what video models can I use, and what do they cost?

make a 5 second clip of a paper boat going down a rain gutter, cinematic, 16:9

use ~/shots/hero.png as a reference and animate the character walking toward camera

what's in my Dare library from this week?

Claude will quote you a credit estimate before spending anything, and you can always ask it to do a dry run first.

Tools

CLI

Configuration

Credentials are read in this order, first hit wins:

1. DARE_CLIENT_TOKEN in the environment
2. ~/.dare-mcp/config.json (written by setup)

The stored file is plain JSON, so you can edit it directly:

{

"clientToken": "eyJ...", "maxCreditsPerCall": 500, "uploadRoots": ["/Users/you/Movies", "/Users/you/Pictures"] }

Everything else is environment variables:

DARE_MAX_CREDITS_PER_CALL is a client-side circuit breaker against a model talking itself into a 10-variation 30-second batch (3,200 credits). The default of 500 allows any single Seedance 2.5 clip while blocking runaway batches; raise it deliberately when you want a batch. The estimate is conservative in the one place it cannot be exact: a video reference whose length Dare cannot report is priced at 30 seconds, which is Dare's own assumption. The guard fails closed: if a reference clip's duration cannot be read, the generation is refused rather than submitted on a guessed estimate.

DARE_UPLOAD_ROOTS is an allowlist, not a convenience. Without it, dare_upload_media refuses local paths entirely — otherwise a prompt-injected model could ask the server to upload your shell environment or Claude config, both of which contain DARE_CLIENT_TOKEN. Point it at the folders that actually hold your source footage.

Credit costs

Dare prices every job as provider cost in dollars, times 1.5, converted at 750 credits per $49.99, rounded up to the nearest 1, 5 or 10 credits. The server reproduces that formula exactly; it was checked against real charges (a 4s 480p Seedance 2.5 clip billed 20 credits, as predicted). Typical figures:

Attaching a video reference applies a 0.6x multiplier on Seedance models, and on Seedance 2.5 the reference clip's own seconds are billed on top. Image and audio references do not change the price.

Always sanity-check with dare_estimate_cost before a batch.

Reference-driven generation

1. dare_upload_media  { file_path: "/Users/you/shots/hero.png" }

-> storage_key: "uploads/abc123..."

1. dare_generate_video { prompt: "the character from the reference walks toward camera through fog", reference_storage_keys: ["uploads/abc123..."], duration_seconds: 8 }

Seedance 2.5 takes up to 50 references (30 image, 10 video, 10 audio), each clip 2–30s, 30 combined seconds per kind. With a video reference attached it derives duration and aspect ratio automatically. Seedance 2.0 models take 12 (9/3/3), 15s combined, and need a visual reference alongside any audio one. Veo 3.1 takes up to 3 images and is then fixed at 8 seconds. Kling and Hailuo take no references at all.

Remote HTTP (optional)

A stateless streamable-HTTP entrypoint is included for hosting the server behind a URL:

DARE_CLIENT_TOKEN='eyJ...' \

DARE_MCP_BEARER_TOKEN="$(openssl rand -hex 32)" \ PORT=3000 npx dare-mcp-server http

POST /mcp, health check at /health. The server refuses to start without a bearer token of at least 24 characters, since these tools spend real money. DNS-rebinding protection is on by default and scoped to localhost; widen it with DARE_ALLOWED_HOSTS / DARE_ALLOWED_ORIGINS w