MCP connector for Claude

Local Trades Kit: the ground truth for local work.

Local Trades Kit answers the planning questions contractors and home-service businesses ask: which towns and ZIPs a drive radius really covers and how many homes are in it, which months are busy and slow for the trade where they work, when to ask a customer for a review and what the rules forbid, and which pages their website should have. Every number comes from public US government data stored on our server, and every rule carries its source and the date we read it.

Connector URL

https://mcp.modernmustardseed.com/trades-kit

Streamable HTTP. No sign-in. Every tool is read-only and makes no outside network calls.

Connect it

  1. In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors.
  2. Choose Add custom connector, paste https://mcp.modernmustardseed.com/trades-kit, and save. No account or key is needed.
  3. In a chat, ask about a trade, a town or a job. Claude calls the tools when the question needs them.

In Claude Code: claude mcp add --transport http trades-kit https://mcp.modernmustardseed.com/trades-kit

Try these

The tools

service_area

Map a service area

From a base ZIP or city and a radius, or from a list of ZIPs: every ZIP inside with distance, population, housing units and owner-occupied homes; the towns and Census places inside; the counties touched, with the population inside the area; totals; and up to 20 candidate Business Profile service areas with Google's rules.

Inputs: base (ZIP or "City, ST") with radius_miles (1 to 100), or zips (up to 200); optional max_zips.

seasonal_demand

Get seasonal demand

A month-by-month busy and slow index for the trade, measured from BLS employment for its NAICS industry, beside NOAA temperature, degree day and rain normals for the same area and the sourced seasonal drivers for that trade.

Inputs: trade, and a state or a NOAA climate region (or neither, for the US).

review_request_timing

Time review requests

For each job type in the trade: what to say at completion, the window for one written request (as dates when a completion date is given), the moment the customer can first judge the work, and the Google, Yelp, FTC and TCPA rules with an as-of date.

Inputs: trade; optional job_type and completed_on (YYYY-MM-DD).

trade_service_pages

Plan trade service pages

The standard page set for the trade with what each page must cover, location pages for up to 20 towns, and Google's rules on doorway pages, helpful content, LocalBusiness markup and business names.

Inputs: trade; optional cities, emergency_service, maintenance_plans.

list_trades

List trades

Every supported trade with its id, the names it matches, its NAICS code and its job type ids.

Inputs: None.

How each answer is made

Service areas. We measure straight-line miles from the base point to the Census internal point of every ZIP Code Tabulation Area (the Census version of a residential ZIP) and every Census place, then add up population, housing units and owner-occupied homes from the American Community Survey. Counties get each ZIP's figures in proportion to the share of its land inside the county. Distances are not driving distances. Candidate Business Profile areas are the base town and then the most populous places inside the radius, up to the 20 that Google allows.

Seasonal demand. Each trade maps to one 2022 NAICS industry, with the NAICS index entries that place the work there quoted in the result. We take BLS monthly private-sector employment for that industry from 2022 to 2024, express each month as a percent of its own year's average, and average the three years. A month at 103 or above is busy and at 97 or below is slow. Where BLS withholds a state's months for confidentiality, or the state has under 150 jobs in the industry, we use the state's NOAA climate region and say so. NOAA 1991 to 2020 normals for the same area sit beside it. Seasonal drivers appear only when a public source supports them; anything we could not source is left out.

Review timing. The written request waits a few days to two weeks depending on the job, because two randomized field experiments (Jung, Ryu, Han and Cho, Journal of Marketing, 2023) found next-day review reminders lowered posting while later reminders raised it. The windows and the moment each job can first be judged are our curation of that research for trade work, and the result says so. The platform and federal rules were read on 2026-10-11.

Service pages. The page sets are a taxonomy we built for 42 residential trades from building and running websites for trade businesses. Google's written policies on doorway pages, helpful content, LocalBusiness structured data and business names come with it, linked.

Trades covered

Climate regions

NOAA's nine U.S. climate regions (Karl and Koss, 1984), usable in place of a state:

Data sources and licenses

Every result lists the exact sources it used, with links and the date we read them. Review timing and its rules are informational, not legal advice.

Limits

Troubleshooting

“has no Census ZIP Code Tabulation Area”
The ZIP is a PO Box, military or single-organization ZIP. Use the ZIP of the street address or the town name with its state.
“matches places in N states”
Add the state: “Springfield, MO”.
No busy months listed
Employment in that trade and area moves less than 3 percent either side of the yearly average. The monthly index and the climate normals still show the shape of the year.
The trade is not recognized
Call list_trades and use one of the ids, or a common name such as “plumber” or “AC repair”.

For reviewers

No account, key or setup is needed. Add the connector URL above, then:

  1. list_trades with no arguments returns 42 trades.
  2. service_area with {"base": "59901", "radius_miles": 40} returns 24 ZIPs, 4 counties, about 129,000 people and 20 candidate profile areas led by Kalispell, MT.
  3. seasonal_demand with {"trade": "landscaping", "state": "MN"} returns May to October as busy and July as the peak, with climate normals and a cited lawn fertilization driver.
  4. review_request_timing with {"trade": "hvac", "job_type": "system_install", "completed_on": "2026-10-06"} returns a written request window of 2026-10-13 to 2026-10-20 and the cited rules.
  5. trade_service_pages with {"trade": "plumber", "cities": ["Whitefish, MT"]} returns the page set and one location page.
  6. Errors: {"base": "Springfield", "radius_miles": 10} on service_area and {"trade": "astronaut"} on seasonal_demand each return a specific message.

Support and security

Questions, problems and security reports go to sarah@modernmustardseed.com. A machine-readable contact is at /.well-known/security.txt. How we handle data is in the privacy policy.