curl -fsSL frugal.sh/install | bash

The open routing layer for AI tools.

source-available · byok · any model · no account

every session above is a real captured run, unedited except path shortening

It's just a router.

One Go binary between your agent and its tool providers — search, extract, browse today. Your agent makes the call; Frugal picks the provider per policy, fails over when a provider errors or comes up empty, and stamps the decision — provider_used, cost_usd, and a one-line reason — on every result.

cheap (default) — cheapest capable provider, quota-aware, automatic failover up the ladder.
fast — ordered by your machine's own observed latency (local ledger, successful calls only).
premium — prefers your premium-priced providers, for the requests that matter.
order — your explicit preference list; unlisted providers still serve as fallback.
deny — never called, not even when pinned. Deny every paid rung and nothing leaves your free/local providers.

routing:
  search:
    strategy: fast            # cheap (default) | fast | premium
    deny: [youcom]            # never called — not even pinned
  extract:
    order: [firecrawl, goreadability]

Or describe the job and let Frugal classify it — frugal__execute {"intent": "…", "priority": "cheap | balanced | premium"}. Classification is deterministic URL/keyword cues, no model call, and the reason field always says what was decided.

Cost is the flagship policy.

Tool prices haven't fallen the way model prices have. You.com is 5× Serper; SearXNG on your own machine is free. Under the cheap policy Frugal walks each row left to right and you keep the gap. Cost is one policy among several — it's the one with a receipt.

capability	free / local	cheap paid	premium paid
search	SearXNG · Marginalia · Wikipedia	Serper $0.001	You.com $0.005	shipping
extract	go-readability (local)	—	Firecrawl $0.001/pg	shipping
browse	Playwright (planned)	Browserless $0.002	Browserbase (planned)	partial
code exec	local Docker	E2B ~$0.10/hr	Modal	planned
embeddings	nomic · bge (local)	3-small $0.02/1M	Voyage-3 · Cohere	planned
transcribe	whisper.cpp (local)	Deepgram $0.0043/min	Whisper $0.006/min	planned

Every call lands in a local ledger (~/.frugal/usage — JSONL, never leaves your machine) and frugal stats prints the month's receipt: what you paid, what the same calls cost at premium rack rate, what you kept.

Install

No SaaS. No account. No keys required to start — Marginalia, Wikipedia, and go-readability work with an empty environment. Releases are cosign-signed; the installer verifies the checksum before moving the binary into place. From here to your first intelligently routed tool call: under five minutes.

curl -fsSL https://frugal.sh/install | bash
frugal mcp install

Add SERPER_API_KEY, YDC_API_KEY, FIRECRAWL_API_KEY, BROWSERLESS_TOKEN, or SEARXNG_URL to unlock the paid and self-hosted rungs — only tools whose providers are configured get registered.

From source

git clone https://github.com/brainsparker/frugal.git && cd frugal && make build

Your keys stay local: no control plane, no data retention by architecture. Source-available under BUSL 1.1 — self-hosting and internal commercial use permitted; each release converts to Apache 2.0 four years after publication.

Frugal Cloud — coming, not shipped.

The binary stays local and self-hostable, always. Cloud adds the team layer on top: hosted policy management, team workspaces and shared policy templates, org-wide usage analytics and cost reporting, provider health monitoring and routing traces, org-wide key management.

Everything above is roadmap, not product. The open router never requires it — no lock-in.

join the waitlist view on github