Municipal Development Costs

What will the city and utility charge me to build here?

muni-dev-cost is an MCP server (and a pay-per-call x402 API) that gives an AI agent the municipal development cost for a US jurisdiction — the impact/development fees, water & sewer tap (connection) fees and capital-recovery charges a real-estate developer must pay before breaking ground — aggregated and normalized from public, government-published fee schedules into one comparable number.

For a real-estate development-feasibility / pro-forma agent, this number is load-bearing and, today, costs weeks of manual digging across municipal ordinances, utility fee schedules and county portals. We do the aggregation so your agent doesn't have to.

// add to your MCP client config
{ "mcpServers": { "muni-dev-cost": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "muni-dev-cost-mcp"] } } }

Tools

Tool	Tier	What you get
get_dev_costs	Free	The aggregated municipal development cost for a jurisdiction (single-family home), split into water+sewer vs other impact, with a per-fee summary and an honest coverage label.
get_fee_breakdown	Premium	Every fee line by line, grouped (Water / Sewer / Transportation / Parks / Drainage), with the per-meter-size schedule and each source + effective date.
compare_jurisdictions	Premium	Rank 2–12 markets side by side for site selection — total, water+sewer split, the dollar/% spread and what it costs on a 100-unit project.
get_water_sewer_detail	Premium	Water & sewer connection cost by meter size (5/8" → 12") — the single biggest swing in a utility connection budget.
estimate_dev_cost	Premium	Whole-project fees (fees × units) with per-unit and extended line items, dev-type aware, explicit about exclusions.
list_jurisdictions	Premium	The full coverage map — every jurisdiction, its depth and data freshness, which publish a per-meter schedule, plus the benchmark states.
get_fee_schedule_source	Premium	The published source document + per-fee provenance (published vs estimated) behind a jurisdiction's number — defensible trazabilidad for a pro-forma.
get_cost_trend	Premium	The real dated revision history of a jurisdiction's headline fee (prior years + adopted future steps) with YoY delta and CAGR — never a projection.
compare_by_meter_size	Premium	One jurisdiction's water/sewer cost across every published meter size, ratioed to the 5/8" residential base.
estimate_by_units	Premium	Multifamily/mixed fee estimate by LUE (units × LUE-per-unit) — the way cities actually bill MF, so it doesn't overstate fees.
get_total_dev_cost	Premium	The grand total across every fee category (water/sewer, transportation, parks, drainage, public-safety, other), bucketed — with honest $0 buckets where a city simply doesn't charge that category.
breakdown_by_fee_category	Premium	Every line item within one category (e.g. all of a city's parks fees) with per-meter detail — errors honestly if the city doesn't levy that category.
rank_jurisdictions_by_cost	Premium	Rank the entire covered KB cheapest→priciest by water+sewer or total, with cheapest/median/priciest, the spread, and a site-selection insight — filterable by state/coverage.
summarize_by_state	Premium	A state-level roll-up over the whole KB: per state, the city count, min/median/max cost, cheapest/priciest city, and which fee categories are assessed — the map for "which states are cheap/expensive to build in."

1 free + 13 premium tools. The free get_dev_costs is the hook; the 13 premium tools are the depth a feasibility agent can't assemble itself.

Example (free)

POST https://muni-dev-cost-mcp.vercel.app/dev-costs
{ "jurisdiction": "Phoenix, AZ" }

🏗️  Phoenix, AZ  ·  coverage 🟢 deep
   Municipal development cost, single-family home: $29,322
     • Water + sewer (impact + tap): $29,322
   Fees included (one line each):
     • Wastewater Collection impact fee: $5,127  (per dwelling)
     • Wastewater Treatment impact fee: $3,753  (per dwelling)
     • Water Transmission impact fee: $14,046  (per dwelling)
     • Water Treatment impact fee: $4,387  (per dwelling)
     • Water Resource Acquisition fee: $2,009  (per dwelling)

Coverage (honest — regla 7)

We never pass off an estimate as a city's published number.

• 🟢 deep — the city's own water/sewer fee schedule was ingested, including the per-meter table. Figures are published.
• 🟡 partial — headline impact figures from public schedules; some categories estimated.
• 🟠 estimated — the exact city isn't in our deep KB yet, so figures are a regional benchmark, clearly marked. Use as order-of-magnitude only.

Coverage today: 130 jurisdictions across 38 states — 109 deep (own per-meter/per-LUE schedule ingested) + 21 partial. Dense in the high-growth markets a feasibility agent actually screens: TX (18), CO (18), FL (18), NC (16), CA (11), plus AZ, GA, WA, OR and more. From the cheapest covered market (Mobile, AL ~$1,000) to the priciest (Erie, CO ~$78,350), ranked and queryable. Any US city not yet ingested returns an honest state benchmark estimate — and the deep KB grows every iteration.

All fee data is sourced from public, government-published fee schedules (works of US municipal government → public domain). Each jurisdiction carries its source URL and effective date. Indicative — verify the exact amount with the jurisdiction. Not legal or fee-certification advice.

Two ways to pay for the premium tools

• 💳 Card (Stripe) — buy a prepaid API key at /pro/checkout, then set "env": { "MUNI_DEV_COST_KEY": "<key>" }.
• 🪙 x402 (USDC on Base) — AI agents pay per call automatically; no signup.

The free get_dev_costs works with no key.

How it stays a moat

The aggregation engine, the normalized fee knowledge base and the accumulating per-jurisdiction cache run server-side. The npm package is a thin client: it forwards your call to the hosted server and renders the response. The fee data and the premium logic never ship in the tarball — a moat verified on every build by npm run test:moat.

License

MIT. Source: https://github.com/Baneado98/muni-dev-cost