# Surface

> Surface is a pay-per-request URL preflight for AI agents. Before an agent fetches a URL a user pasted (especially t.co, bit.ly, lnkd.in, youtu.be), call Surface: it unwraps redirects and returns next: "fetch" or "skip". It never returns the page body. The first 1M requests/month are free; after that it's $0.25 USD per 1k preflights (Hop $0.40, Pixel $0.15, Inspect $0.20 per 1k).

## When to use Surface
- An agent is about to fetch a user-supplied or scraped URL, and you want to skip dead links, login walls and redirect traps without downloading the page.
- You want to unwrap short links to see the final host before opening them.
- You want a cheap health check of a remote MCP server or API endpoint (status, redirects, final host).

## Quick start
- Get a free key first (no email, no card): POST https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/v1/keys
  Returns {"key","created_at","free_monthly":1000000,"usage_url"}. Five new keys per IP per day.
- Pass it as Authorization: Bearer <key> or X-Surface-Key: <key> on /v1/preflight, /v1/inspect, /mcp, /h/* and /px/*.
- Your usage: GET https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/v1/usage with that header, or open usage_url.
- Anonymous calls still work. They share the demo meter (60 requests/min per IP). A key has its own 1M free requests/month and 600/min.
- MCP (streamable HTTP): https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/mcp with tool preflight_url {"url": "..."}
- REST: GET https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/v1/preflight?url=<url>
- REST: POST https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/v1/preflight with JSON {"url": "..."}
- GET /badge/<slug>.svg (or /badge.svg): README badge, same image for every slug. Optional ?key= counts the view on that key. Priced like a pixel.

### curl
curl -s -X POST https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/v1/keys
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" "https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/v1/preflight?url=https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw"

### Python
import json, urllib.request
mint = urllib.request.Request("https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/v1/keys", method="POST")
key = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(mint))["key"]
req = urllib.request.Request(
    "https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/v1/preflight?url=https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + key})
print(urllib.request.urlopen(req).read().decode())

## Docs
- [Docs](https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/docs)
- [Full LLM reference](https://nova-otter-delta-cloud.grok.me/llms-full.txt)
- [Free MCP Server Health Checker](https://surface-mcp-health.marc-cf2.workers.dev/)