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33 lines
3.8 KiB
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33 lines
3.8 KiB
Text
---
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date: "2026-07-05"
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---
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## SurfSense's Next Chapter: Competitive Intelligence for AI Agents
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Happy Independence Day to everyone celebrating in the United States! We hope you had a wonderful Fourth of July. It felt like the right weekend for a declaration of our own.
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Today we are pointing SurfSense at a single mission: **give your AI agents competitive intelligence.**
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### How we got here
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For the past couple of months we set out to build the best general research agent for your own knowledge. That chapter treated us well. As the open-source alternative to NotebookLM, SurfSense earned a community we are genuinely proud of: more than 15,000 GitHub stars, self-hosted deployments everywhere from homelabs to enterprises, and users who pushed the product further than we imagined.
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That same period settled a bigger question. Agentic tools like Claude, OpenCode, Hermes, and OpenClaw have proven themselves. Agents that plan, use tools, and finish multi-step work on their own are no longer a demo, they are how work gets done. General research assistance is becoming something every capable agent does out of the box.
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So we asked what these agents still lack. Not reasoning. Not tools. **Live market data and the workflows around it.** An agent asked "what are competitors charging this week?" or "what is Reddit saying about us since the launch?" has nowhere trustworthy to look. We want to be one of the first, and hopefully the definitive, open-source competitive intelligence agent platforms. This focus also lets our team pour all of our energy into the high-value workflows that genuinely need AI automation.
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### What SurfSense is now
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- **Platform-native connectors for live market data.** [Reddit](/reddit), [YouTube](/youtube), [Google Maps](/google-maps), [Google Search](/google-search), and the [open web](/web-crawl). Each one is a typed REST endpoint you can call from any language with your SurfSense API key.
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- **An MCP server that makes every connector an agent tool.** Add the [SurfSense MCP server](/mcp-server) to Claude, Cursor, or your own agent framework. And with [external MCP connectors](/external-mcp-connectors), your SurfSense agents can use any MCP server too, with one-click OAuth for apps like Notion, Slack, and Jira.
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- **An agent harness, not just raw data.** Retries, structured output, and credit metering are built in, so agents go from a question to a brief without you building the plumbing.
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- **Automations for the workflows that matter.** Scheduled and event-triggered agents watch competitor pricing, track brand mentions, monitor rankings and reviews, then deliver briefs and alerts.
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- **Simpler pricing.** Self-hosting stays free with no metering. Cloud is pay as you go: start with $5 of free credit, connectors bill per item returned, crawls per page fetched, models at provider cost. Failed calls are never billed. Details on the [pricing page](/pricing).
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### To our existing users: nothing you rely on is going away
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This is an addition, not a replacement. Your knowledge base, chat with citations, reports, podcasts, presentations, automations, and collaborative chats all keep working exactly as they do today. You can still upload files and sync Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox. Self-hosting stays free and open source, and your existing deployments keep running without any action from you. What changes is where we invest: expect deeper connectors, sharper agent workflows, and broader market coverage.
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If you are building agents, [grab an API key](/login) or add the MCP server, and start with the [connector catalog](/connectors). Tell us what you are building on [Discord](https://discord.gg/ejRNvftDp9) or [GitHub](https://github.com/MODSetter/SurfSense).
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We think the next great competitive intelligence tool will not be a dashboard. It will be an agent that already knows your market. We are building the platform it runs on.
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