Ed 
The Follow Up Boss MCP server now installs from a single file. You download it, you double click it, Claude Desktop asks for your API key, and you are finished. No terminal. Until today you had to clone a repository, run npm install, and hand edit a config file with an absolute path in it, which is a sentence that loses most of the people who would actually benefit. That was the barrier.
There are 160 tools in there now, which is every endpoint the official Follow Up Boss API exposes. Safe Mode is on by default and hides the 23 tools that can delete things, so you get 137 unless you deliberately go turn the rest on (you can, I would just rather you have to go find the switch yourself).
But the install was never the interesting part of the last thirty days.
Somebody I have never met made it more honest
In July a GitHub user named drew778 opened a pull request. He had found a test that was quietly passing when it should have been failing on a 401, which is the worst kind of bug, the kind that tells you your software works better than it does. It was my bug. He fixed it, for free. We have never met.
And that does not happen behind a paywall. Nobody audits your error handling on a Saturday because they enjoyed your pricing page. Seth Godin has been saying for twenty years that the work you give away is the work that gets better, and I did not really believe it until a stranger sent me a patch.
The rest of the month is less dramatic. OAuth tokens survive a restart now, so people stop getting logged out for no reason. CI runs on every commit, four security bumps went in, and npm audit was sitting at zero before the bundle shipped. Boring work. Boring is the goal right.
Why it is free
Your CRM data is yours, every contact and note you have logged since the day you opened the account. Pointing an AI at it should not require paying rent to anybody, and it should very specifically not require paying me. I sell real estate. I am not trying to sell you a monthly seat on your own database.
So it runs on your machine with your API key. Nothing routes through my servers, nothing gets logged on my end. People sometimes read that as a limitation and it is the opposite, that is the whole design.
The part that costs me something
I did look at hosting it. ChatGPT and Gemini cannot reach software running on your laptop, and a hosted version would have opened this up to a lot more agents (I got pretty far down that road before I did the reading I should have done first). Then I read the Follow Up Boss API terms of use. They bar hosting API access on behalf of other people, free or paid. So there is no hosted version and there is not going to be one.
Which is fine. Self hosted is the honest version anyway, because at no point does your client list take a detour through somebody else’s infrastructure. Lets be real, that is the part most of us should have been asking about first.
Install steps are at neuhausre.com/fub-mcp. If you get it connected and wonder what to actually do with it, the realtor daily brief guide is where I would start. And if you want the story of why this exists at all, I wrote that one already.
Frequently Asked Questions
One last thing
If you try it, tell me what breaks. drew778 already proved that is how this gets better. You can reach me through my page here or the office at (512) 366-3270.
