Paid plans

The verified regulatory record, inside your AI workspace.

Vellum Search speaks MCP — the open protocol your agents already use. Connect it once and Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-capable workspace can search the record and cite real sources, with the coverage included in your plan enforced server-side.

Endpoint

https://search.vellumintel.com/mcp

Authentication: a connection key as a bearer token. Create one in your account and choose which product allowance it uses. Search keys use your Search coverage and work only with MCP; API keys use the separately billed API allowance and work with REST and MCP across the full catalogue. Holding one product never changes the other. Free and trial Search accounts do not include MCP search.

Coverage, allowance and billing

Free and trial	No MCP search.
Ecosystems	50,000 MCP credits/month across the ecosystems in your subscription — about 5,000 default ten-result searches.
All access	100,000 MCP credits/month across the whole catalogue — about 10,000 default searches.
Team	300,000 MCP credits/month, shared across the organisation, across the whole catalogue — about 30,000 default searches.
API pay as you go	Separately billed from Search. Full catalogue through REST and MCP; no base fee, 0.5p/credit and 30 requests/minute. Usage is charged at each 2,000-credit threshold (£10 before VAT), with any remainder charged at period end. It does not add paid Search access or change an existing Search plan.
API subscription	Separately billed from Search. 250,000 combined REST and MCP credits included in each monthly metering period, then 0.3p/credit. Overage is charged at each 33,334-credit threshold (£100 before VAT), with any remainder charged at period end. The monthly metering period also applies when the fixed base is paid annually. £499/month or £4,990/year; 120 requests/minute and 5 webhooks. It does not add paid Search access or change an existing Search plan.

Billing is by credit, not by call: one credit is one search result, and a full record from get_record — the complete evidence layer, with body text and provenance — counts as forty. A search is charged on the limit you ask for, so a ten-result search costs 10 credits whether it finds ten records or none, and asking for 100 costs 100. That is knowable before you call, and it is why a ten-result search still costs 5p — exactly what one call cost before. Each successful REST data request, including each page of results, is charged the same way. Initialisation, ping, tools/list, invalid or unauthenticated calls, responses not produced because the Service is unavailable, account actions, /v1/usage, catalogue metadata and webhook deliveries do not count. Ecosystems, All access and Team allowances reset at 00:00 UTC on the first of the month. API usage follows the monthly Stripe metering period shown in Account.

Pay as you go costs 0.5p/credit — 5p for a default ten-result search. The API subscription works out at about 0.2p/credit when its full included allowance is used, then costs 0.3p/credit. You can set your own usage-charge cap in Account, lower it at any time, or raise it within the self-service range. The defaults are £500 for pay as you go and £1,900 for API-subscription overage. A rejected request returns spending_cap_reached and an Account link.

Threshold amounts exclude VAT. Stripe can invoice slightly above a threshold when requests arrive concurrently or usage aggregation completes just after the boundary. A failed threshold charge pauses further REST and MCP data requests until billing is resolved; Account and billing access remain available.

Enterprise: over ~1,000,000 credits/month, data feeds, redistribution or SLAs — from £2,500/month, by agreement. Talk to us. Self-service access does not permit redistribution or resale of the record.

Check the current shared allowance without consuming it:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_VELLUM_KEY" \
  "https://search.vellumintel.com/v1/usage"

One command

claude mcp add --transport http vellum https://search.vellumintel.com/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_VELLUM_KEY"

That's the whole integration in Claude Code. Other MCP clients take the JSON below.

Claude Desktop / other MCP clients

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vellum": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://search.vellumintel.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_VELLUM_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Let your agent do it

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor, or any AI coding agent. It performs the whole integration — registration, verification, wiring — on its own. Swap in your key first.

Integrate Vellum Search (verified EU/UK regulatory records) into this project.

1. Register the MCP server: endpoint https://search.vellumintel.com/mcp, transport HTTP,
   header "Authorization: Bearer <MY_VELLUM_KEY>". In Claude Code that is:
   claude mcp add --transport http vellum https://search.vellumintel.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer <MY_VELLUM_KEY>"
   For other clients, add the equivalent entry to the MCP config file.
2. Verify the connection: call the search_records tool with query "age assurance" and
   confirm results return titles, publication dates and canonical source URLs.
3. Wherever this project answers regulatory questions, route them through search_records
   first; fetch full detail with get_record. Always cite title, date and canonical URL.
   If Vellum returns zero records for a query, report that honestly instead of
   substituting web search — absence from the verified record is itself information.
4. If this account has either API option, REST is also available at
   GET https://search.vellumintel.com/v1/search?q=... with the same header.

Tools

Tool	What it does
search_records	Natural-language search over the catalogue included in your plan. Filters: jurisdiction, ecosystem, limit. Returns titles, snippets, dates, provenance.
get_record	Fetch one record by id — full detail with source link, authority tier and evidence grade.

REST on the API plans

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer vk_YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://search.vellumintel.com/v1/search?q=age+assurance&limit=5"

API keys work with both REST and MCP. Pay as you go charges 0.5p/credit. The API subscription includes 250,000 combined credits in each monthly metering period, then charges 0.3p/credit; this monthly period also applies with annual base billing. Successful data responses carry data_as_of and a build id, so you can identify the release queried. A REST search can return up to 100 records and is charged one credit per record requested. Every successful response carries x-vellum-credits-charged and x-vellum-credits-remaining. Results beyond offset=1000 are not paginable — narrow the query by ecosystem, jurisdiction, regulator or date range instead.

Webhooks on the API subscription

Register an HTTPS endpoint in your account and we POST new records to it as they land — checked hourly, only when something is new. Optionally filtered (query, jurisdiction, ecosystem, regulator, authority). Up to 5 endpoints; deliveries do not consume the monthly API allowance.

Set the filters when you add an endpoint in Account: keywords search the record text; jurisdiction and ecosystem use the same public catalogue as Search; and regulator or authority narrows the publishing body. Leave every filter blank to receive all new records.

POST https://your-system.example/hooks/vellum
x-vellum-webhook-id: 01H…
x-vellum-signature: t=1789000000,v1=<hex>

{"event":"records.new","data_as_of":"…","count":3,"records":[…]}

Verify the signature: v1 = HMAC_SHA256(secret, t + "." + body) — the secret is shown once when you create the endpoint. Failed deliveries retry with backoff; dedupe by webhook_id + data_as_of. Reply 2xx; after 20 failed attempts an endpoint is paused for review. A quiet hour sends nothing — absence of a delivery means nothing new matched.