Home · Guides

A month of paperwork, one archive

Zip everything in ~/Documents/accounts/2026-08 into august.zip, but leave out the drafts folder.

Paste this into Claude with the server connected.

Packing takes a glob, so **/*.pdf or everything except a subfolder both work. Free is 20 archives a calendar month at up to 25 MB and 200 entries each. Pro removes all three.

The half that matters more

Reading an archive is never metered, on any tier. Neither are the guards. When somebody sends you a zip:

What is inside invoices.zip? Do not unpack it yet.

Paste this into Claude with the server connected.

zip_list tells you before anything touches your disk:

• Absolute paths. An entry named /etc/something wants to write outside where you unpacked it.
• Dot-dot entries. The classic traversal: ../../.ssh/authorized_keys looks harmless in a listing you never read.
• Symlinks. A link that points somewhere real turns a later write into a write to that target.
• Duplicate names. Two entries with one name means whichever is extracted second wins, and you cannot tell from the outside which that is.
• The compression ratio. An entry that claims 200 MB inside a 199 KB file is a zip bomb, and it is reported as a number rather than discovered as a full disk.

These checks run on every tier because a guard behind a paywall is not a guard.

Reading one file out without unpacking

Read the README out of that archive.

Paste this into Claude with the server connected.

zip_extract_text pulls one entry's text without writing anything to disk. Useful for checking a manifest, and useful for the case where you want one file out of an archive of two hundred. zip_extract unpacks properly when you have decided to.

A realistic accountant handover

1. Export expenses to CSV with expense_export, capped at 200 rows on free and never partial.
2. Export the bank with statement_export.
3. Merge the receipts into one PDF with pdf_merge.
4. Zip the folder.

Four calls, one file, and nothing uploaded at any step. The zip server makes no network call of any kind, and neither do the three servers feeding it.

Free tiers from data/facts.json. Seven tools on this server, from data/tools.json. Across all releases the packaged bundles have been downloaded 5,314 times, counted with gh api repos/theluckystrike/mcp-servers/releases --paginate on 2026-09-07; zip.mcpb is the single most downloaded of them at 50 in v0.20.0 alone.

Questions

Does it handle rar or 7z?

No, zip only. Those formats need their own decoders and neither ships here. An archive it cannot read is refused by name rather than half-read.

Can it password-protect an archive?

No. Zip encryption comes in several incompatible flavours with a long history of weak ones, and shipping a checkbox that produces the weak kind would be worse than not offering it. Encrypt the file with a tool built for it if that is the requirement.

What counts against the 20 archives a month?

Creating one. Listing, extracting text and extracting files are unlimited on every tier, as are all the safety checks. So receiving and inspecting archives never runs out; only making them does.

What happens at the 25 MB free limit?

The archive is refused with the size, rather than produced and truncated. The same principle runs through this collection: a partial file that looks complete is the worst possible output, so the servers refuse instead.

Related

All MCP servers and prices · All guides · Buy the bundle $39