Both answer "what is the per diem for this trip" from a chat client. The difference is what data
sits behind the answer and how many schemes it covers.
gsa-perdiem-mcp
(com.1102tools/gsa-perdiem-mcp on the official registry) calls the live api.gsa.gov
Per Diem API for US federal CONUS lodging and M&IE rates, including the non-standard-area rates for
specific cities that a bundled CONUS-standard table cannot carry. Ours ships three bundled rate tables,
Polish, UK and US, and does the trip arithmetic: elapsed hours, the partial-day fraction, meal deductions
and a saved trip record. It has no network call and no US non-standard-locality table.
| Fact | Ours | gsa-perdiem-mcp |
|---|---|---|
| What it looks up | Prices one trip's allowance: amount per day and total, with the partial-day fraction and meal deductions the scheme applies | GSA Per Diem API rates by city, state or ZIP, an M&IE meal-tier breakdown, a trip cost estimate and a multi-city comparison |
| Schemes covered | Three: Polish delegation regulation (domestic and 34 countries), HMRC UK benchmark scale rates, US GSA CONUS standard | One: US GSA Per Diem (CONUS), including the non-standard-area rates by city/state/ZIP, not only the standard rate |
| Network or bundled | Bundled JSON tables read from disk. No network call anywhere in the server | Network. Every lookup calls api.gsa.gov live over the api.data.gov gateway |
| Install path | npx -y @theluckystrike/mcp-per-diem, no account, no key | uvx gsa-perdiem-mcp. Works with the shared DEMO_KEY (about 10 requests/hour across every user of it) or a free personal api.data.gov key (1,000 requests/hour) |
| Price | Free tier unlimited on rate lookups and calculations, 5 trips saved a month; Pro $19 once, or $39 for the bundle | Free. No pricing tier in its README |
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
Pick it if the trip is US federal or federal-adjacent travel and the destination might be one of the
roughly 300 non-standard-area localities the GSA prices above the CONUS standard rate: New York City,
San Francisco and the rest. Its README states it hits the live GSA API for exactly that reason, so a
mid-year rate change shows up on the next call. It also gives an IGCE-oriented workflow,
estimate_travel_cost and compare_locations across several cities in one call,
and names two companion servers, bls-oews-mcp and gsa-calc-mcp, for the wage and
ceiling-rate side of a cost estimate.
Pick ours for a Polish delegacja or a UK HMRC domestic claim: gsa-perdiem-mcp has no scheme for either. Pick it too for a US CONUS-standard trip where the destination is not one of the non-standard localities, since the standard rate does not change between calls and a bundled table needs no network and no api.data.gov key at all. Ours also does the arithmetic a rate lookup does not: elapsed hours across a clock change, the partial-day ladder, meal deductions, and a saved trip record with a per-scheme, per-month report and ready-made expense-tracker export arguments.
The per-diem package's adversarial suite includes the substring-match defect a country-name lookup can
fall into: a naive fallback priced a trip to Oman at Romania's rate because "romania".includes("oman")
is true. The fix is a prefix match of four characters or more that fails closed instead of guessing, and
it is asserted in test/adversarial.test.mjs. gsa-perdiem-mcp's own README states it carries
437 regression tests across seven rounds of testing against the live GSA API, including one P0
path-traversal fix and 23 P1 silent-wrong-data fixes, and points to its own testing.md for
the record.
Ours, Claude Code:
claude mcp add per-diem -- npx -y @theluckystrike/mcp-per-diemgsa-perdiem-mcp, with a personal api.data.gov key (recommended):
claude mcp add gsa-perdiem -e PERDIEM_API_KEY=your-key -- uvx gsa-perdiem-mcpExact config file paths per client are on the setup pages, and the longer walkthrough is in per diem and travel allowances from chat.
Yes. Tool names do not collide: ours are perdiem_calc, trip_record and so on; gsa-perdiem-mcp uses lookup_city_perdiem, estimate_travel_cost and its own names. Nothing is shared between them.
Only ours. gsa-perdiem-mcp is US GSA CONUS only; its README names DoD-set OCONUS rates and State Department foreign rates as out of scope for the tool, and has no Polish or UK scheme at all.
gsa-perdiem-mcp does, every time: it reads live from api.gsa.gov. Ours reads bundled JSON tables on disk and makes no network call, so the same trip priced twice always gives the same answer.
Both have a free tier. gsa-perdiem-mcp's README states no price at all, though the shared DEMO_KEY caps around 10 requests an hour and a free personal api.data.gov key raises that to 1,000. Ours is free and unlimited on rate lookups and calculations, with a 5-trips-a-month cap on saving; Pro is $19 once.
gsa-perdiem-mcp's tools, pricing and network behaviour come from its README at github.com/1102tools-dev/federal-contracting-mcps/tree/main/servers/gsa-perdiem-mcp and its registry entry for com.1102tools/gsa-perdiem-mcp, read on 2026-09-05.
Product page · Setup per client · Guides · All comparisons · Buy Pro $19