FATSEARCH

Reads the pages your agent's built-in fetch can't (JS pages, PDFs) through your own provider key,

kept on disk as clean Markdown, navigated by outline and ids.

same question · same answer · 81× less context

That's the point.

Every page your agent reads costs you this

Your agent gets a short outline. It reads one section when it needs depth, not the whole page.

Menus, cookie banners, navigation, footer links, tracking scripts: gone.

Prices, dates, numbers: kept (loss guard counts every one) .

[!TIP]

The "free" fetch costs ~100× more at the model. And it stays in context, every turn after.

Your key never touches the chat

fats setup opens a one-time key form on 127.0.0.1, behind a random token, for 30 minutes.

You paste the key there in your browser, so it stays out of the chat, the model's context and the agent's logs.

The form refuses a POST from another origin; the key is checked live, saved with mode 0600, sent only to its provider.

$ fats setup decodo

= setup decodo · waiting for the key at http://127.0.0.1:59802/k/e0c8baba7a5b058947f4fdab97dabb05/decodo · 30 min · $0 tell the user (never ask for the key in chat):

1. open https://dashboard.decodo.com/web-data/playground (no account yet: https://dashboard.decodo.com/register)
2. Copy the API key shown on the Web Data playground. Do NOT paste it in this chat.
3. open http://127.0.0.1:59802/k/e0c8baba7a5b058947f4fdab97dabb05/decodo , paste the key, press Save

then: fats setup (when the user says done; end your turn, do not poll · checks it, $0) link dead (30 min passed)? run fats setup decodo again and give the user the new line 3

fats setup shows a form still waiting (! form_waiting decodo · 23 min left · ) or one whose time ran out (! form_expired decodo · the link the user got is dead → fats setup decodo · new link, same 3 steps). Over SSH (SSH_CONNECTION or SSH_TTY set) one more line says how to paste the key in a terminal there.

On hard pages

fats tries plain HTTP first (free). If the page is a JS shell, a captcha, or a wall, it climbs to your providers: cheapest first, hedged, with cost tracking on every call.

$ fats https://www.nytimes.com/ dry:true

nytimes.com/ fetch plain → oxy (after a captcha) → bd ∥ oxyjs after 5s → new u1 · up to $0.0040

$ fats stats u1 rust-lang.org · Rust Programming Language · plain 230ms $0.0000 · 1.2ktok u2 en.wikipedia.org · Rust (programming language… · plain 558ms $0.0000 · 40.9ktok

fats stats is the marketing: real numbers, not claims.

38 hard pages social · news · shops · travel · classifieds · search · one run each

FATSEARCH reads more of the hard pages; Firecrawl and Tavily are faster on the pages they do read (same pages, medians: 23.7 s vs 4.9 s, 23.7 s vs 1.0 s). Readers ran on different days. Method and every row → · the table above: one page, six readers →

Tested in agents FATSEARCH 0.1.3 · Claude Code 2.1.280, one run each, 2026-10-19

• 51 tasks, FATSEARCH MCP vs Firecrawl MCP: 50/51 vs 51/51 right · $15.06 vs $53.48 per 1k tasks · median 5.3 s vs 6.7 s · slowest tenth 43.8 s vs 21.5 s. Details →
• Claude Code's WebFetch got 403 on npm, Medium and G2; FATSEARCH read all three. Details →
• One Wikipedia page, open-source readers: FATSEARCH 1,384 tokens to the answer; mcp-server-fetch, Crawl4AI, mcp-searxng and self-hosted Firecrawl 75k–117k for the whole page. Details →
• Full tables, losses included: docs/benchmarks.md

Get started

| 1 · INSTALL | 2 · KEYS (optional) | 3 · PLUG IN | |:-:|:-:|:-:| | brew install fatsearch/tap/fatsearch | fats setup | claude mcp add --scope user fats -- fats mcp |

or curl -fsSL https://fatsearch.com/install.sh | sh · Windows: npm i -g fatsearch · cargo install --locked fatsearch · every host →

[!NOTE]

The package is fatsearch; the command is fats (like ripgrep → rg). Homebrew, npm and the install

script also add fatsearch as a second name for it; cargo install adds only fats.

No account needed. Without a provider key, fats reads what a plain request gets; web search needs an Oxylabs or Bright Data key.

With any one key (Oxylabs, Bright Data or Decodo) it renders and unblocks pages through that provider.

Setup

You, at a terminal: run fats setup. It is a menu (↑↓ Enter): the free fetch and each provider with its state, then Settings (agent connection, cache, stats, telemetry). Pick a provider, paste its key (shown as • and a count), and fats checks it live before it saves it. fats setup oxy jumps straight to one (also bd, decodo, gh).

Your agent, or no terminal: the agent runs fats setup oxy (or bd, decodo, gh). It prints the provider's dashboard link and a one-time form on 127.0.0.1, open for 30 minutes. The agent gives you the URL; you paste the key into the form in your browser, never into the chat (what it prints). Then the agent runs fats setup to check it ($0).

Keys go to auth.json in the key dir (mode 0600) and are sent only to their provider. `auth.json` is the one key source: fats never sends a key from the environment, so the key you saved is the key every call uses (fats shows each one's last 4 characters: keys oxy …6XBR · bd none · decodo none · gh none · auth.json). On a machine without a browser (CI, SSH), pipe the key in: printf %s "$KEY" | fats setup oxy checks it and saves it. Keys already exported: run fats setup import-env once: it checks them, copies them in where no key is saved, and never replaces a saved one. Replacing a key keeps the old file as auth.json.bak (0600).

List prices per page, the ones dry:true and fats stats use. Oxylabs and Bright Data spend can be checked with fats account; Decodo has no usage read for this key, so its $ is the list price, never reconciled.

Turn one off without losing its key: fats setup oxy off, back with fats setup oxy on.

The free fetch is your own connection: one request per page from your IP, at most one start per site per second; a page waits its turn rather than buying a provider call. Providers use their own IPs and have no pace. fats setup free off sends every page to a provider instead, so every page costs.

MCP

One tool. One string. Same commands.

fats setup mcp claude                                             # or codex, cursor: fats adds itself

claude mcp add --scope user fats -- fats mcp # Claude Code codex mcp add fats -- fats mcp # Codex {"mcpServers": {"fats": {"command": "fats", "args": ["mcp"]}}} # Cursor, Desktop, …

The tool is fats(cmd) and its card is ~60 tokens. An agent that knows fats u1#3 knows the whole tool.

MCP Registry: mcp-name: io.github.fatsearch/fats

Commands

mods limit:20 country:de js:true wait:30 fresh:true · one screen of all of it: fats help · how to use it well: fats guide

For agents

The agent skill is versioned in this repo (skills/fatsearch/SKILL.md): how to read pages without flooding context, and how to install, connect and verify fats when it is missing.

npx skills add fatsearch/fatsearch        # Agent Skills standard: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, …

gh skill install fatsearch/fatsearch # the same through GitHub CLI ≥ 2.90

An agent without either CLI reads it pinned to a release: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fatsearch/fatsearch/v0.2.5/skills/fatsearch/SKILL.md. That way the agent sees versioned text it can review, and nothing it runs comes from a website.

Docs as plain Markdown for agents: fatsearch.com/llms.txt.

Telemetry

FATSEARCH shares anonymous usage stats so we can fix what breaks. It never shares what you read or search.

• Never sent: URLs, searches, page text, files, API keys, your IP address, any id.
• Sent: fatsearch version, OS, which package (npm, Homebrew, cargo…), commands used, errors, which providers worked, crashes in our code.

See exactly what's sent with fats telemetry show. Turn it off in `fats setup → Sett