Tomas Rivera is a product manager at a tech company in Portland, Oregon. He has been using OptionsBell for three months. Recorded September 10, 2026.

How he found it

Three months. I use Claude every day for work. OptionsBell's MCP server was the reason I subscribed. I was searching for financial data MCP servers. OptionsBell came up: official provider, hosted, Streamable HTTP transport. I set it up in five minutes. API key, paste the URL, done.

I tried a few other options MCP servers first. One hosted server costs $79 a month on its own. Another requires an Unusual Whales API subscription first - so $150 a month before the MCP does anything. OptionsBell's MCP is included in the $24.99 plan. There's no separate MCP fee.

What he asks it

"What unusual options activity hit my watchlist today?" The MCP returns the scan across all the symbols I've configured. "Show me the top prints by premium." It returns the contracts with strike, expiry, Vol/OI, IV.

I don't leave Claude. I don't open a dashboard. The data comes to me. That's the workflow I wanted when I started using MCP for financial research.

Compared with other MCP servers

The tool descriptions are written for LLMs - concise, front-loaded, with usage examples. The server even has a liveness check tool that requires no API key, so agents can verify connectivity before running queries. That's a detail most servers miss.

The transport is Streamable HTTP with stateless operation. I can run it in ephemeral containers. I can spin it up, query it, tear it down. No session state. No persistent connections. For an agent-first workflow, that's the right architecture.

Agent-ready or agent-first?

I'd call it agent-first. The entire product is designed for LLM consumption. The email alerts are for humans. The MCP server is for agents. Both are included in the same $24.99 plan.

Most financial data services treat AI integration as an afterthought. OptionsBell treats it as a first-class feature. That's the difference.

The biggest change in his workflow

I stopped context-switching. Before, I'd check a dashboard, export data, paste it into Claude, ask a question. Now I ask the question and Claude pulls the data itself.

The MCP server makes OptionsBell part of my agent's toolset. It's not a separate product I have to remember to use. It's just there. That's how tools should work.

The email alerts are for humans. The MCP server is for agents. Both are included in the same plan.

The liveness tool Tomas mentions is ping. The full tool list and the five-minute setup are in the MCP documentation.