Is macadress.com free to use?

For the basics, yes. The web lookup at macadress.com and the keyless GET /v1/vendor/:mac endpoint on api.macadress.com need no account, capped at 1,000 lookups a day per their pricing page. The full JSON API needs a free key, capped at 1,000 lookups a month and 30 requests a minute, and paid tiers start at $19/month for 100,000 lookups.

Does macadress.com's MCP server need an API key?

Yes, on every call, on every plan, free tier included. Its docs list four tools, lookup_mac, batch_lookup_mac, search_vendors, and get_vendor_block, and each one requires an Authorization: Bearer header from a signed-up account. The server is Streamable HTTP only; there's no stdio option to skip the key.

Can I self-host the macadress.com database?

Yes. Their pricing page lists a licensed build of the API and the IEEE sync engine, installable as a .deb package, starting at $999 a year per deployment, aimed at teams that don't want lookups leaving their own network. It's the one thing on their pricing page with no ssid.ai equivalent.

macadress.com pricing, self-hosted option, and free-tier limits

TL;DRmacadress.com's web lookup and keyless API are free with no signup. Its full API, MCP server, and self-hosted license each require an account, self-hosted from $999/year.

Short answer: macadress.com’s web lookup and its keyless GET /v1/vendor/:mac endpoint are free with no signup, capped at 1,000 lookups a day. Go past that and an account shows up: the full JSON API needs a free key, the MCP server needs a bearer key on every call, and a self-hosted deployment starts at $999 a year. ssid.ai published a full side-by-side comparison against macadress.com this week, checked against their own pricing, signup, downloads, and MCP pages.

What’s free without signing up

Two surfaces need nothing at all: the web page at macadress.com, and the keyless name-only endpoint on their API, GET /v1/vendor/:mac. That endpoint is capped at 1,000 lookups a day. It’s a real, usable free tier for anyone checking a handful of addresses by hand or scripting an occasional lookup.

Their bulk database download works the same way: no signup required. /downloads serves the whole vendor registry as CSV, JSON, Cisco’s vendorMacs.xml layout, the Wireshark manuf format, and the Nmap prefix format, all licensed CC0. The page they publish it from showed 58,498 blocks and a same-day rebuild timestamp when checked on 2026-09-18.

Where the account requirement starts

The keyless endpoint only returns the vendor name. The full JSON API, the one with structured fields beyond a bare string, needs a free API key. Signup takes no card, and the free key is capped at 1,000 lookups a month and 30 requests a minute. Paid tiers move that ceiling to $19/month for 100,000 lookups and $79/month for 1,000,000 lookups with a 99.9% SLA, per their own pricing page.

The MCP server requires a key on every call

macadress.com registered its MCP server in the official MCP registry as io.github.samymassoud/macadress, published 2026-08-22. It’s Streamable HTTP only, stateless, with no session to manage, at https://mcp.macadress.com/mcp. The catch is in their own docs: all four of its tools, lookup_mac, batch_lookup_mac, search_vendors, and get_vendor_block, require an Authorization: Bearer header carrying an API key from a macadress.com account. Every call counts against that account’s quota, free tier included, and there’s no stdio transport to bypass the key.

That matters for an AI agent more than for a person clicking a web page. A person can sit through a signup form once. An agent that wants to call a tool the moment it starts can’t, unless whoever built it wired in a bearer key ahead of time.

The self-hosted license

The clearest gap between the two services is a licensed, self-hosted build: the lookup API and the IEEE sync engine behind it, packaged as a .deb install for a buyer’s own infrastructure. Their pricing page lists it starting at $999 a year per deployment, aimed at network access control, IoT fleet management, and MDM vendors who don’t want a lookup leaving their network. Nothing on ssid.ai’s side matches this; ssid.ai is hosted only.

What ssid.ai does instead

ssid.ai’s MAC vendor lookup has never required an account at any volume, and ssid-mcp runs over stdio or hosted Streamable HTTP with no signup and no key on the free tier, so an agent can call it the moment it’s installed. What ssid.ai doesn’t sell is a file you can download or a build you can run on your own servers, which is exactly what macadress.com does sell. The full comparison lays out the rest side by side: vendor coverage, router default logins, the compliance dataset, and every pricing tier on both sides. See also what an OUI is and how vendor lookup works for the mechanics behind any of these lookups.