LABSCO SUMMARY

Alpha Vantage market data, with a real auth story if you host it.

Much of the work here is in how it runs rather than what it fetches: the same server does desktop stdio and a network-facing HTTP mode with OAuth, audience checks and per-call metrics. If you only want quotes in a desktop client, the stdio path needs nothing but the API key.

What it is

A server over the Alpha Vantage market-data API. It runs over stdio for desktop clients, or as a streamable HTTP server when you want it on the network.

What you get

Alpha Vantage stock market data reachable as tools from the conversation
A choice of stdio or streamable HTTP transport, selected when the server starts
OAuth on the HTTP transport: bearer tokens validated either as JWTs or by introspection, with a protected-resource metadata endpoint for discovery
Token audience validation and user-bound sessions, so a token issued for another service is refused
Optional Prometheus metrics per tool call — counts, latency, request and response sizes, live concurrency, and errors split by type
A deployment recipe for AWS Lambda using the stateless MCP pattern

Requirements

A free Alpha Vantage API key, handed to the server as an environment value. It installs from the published Python package or runs from source; the OAuth mode additionally needs an authorization server to point at.

Setup effort

One command plus a key — uvx alphavantage-mcp, then supply credentials

See installation options

USE CASES

01

Pulling market data into an analysis without leaving the chat

Ask for the figures you need and the server fetches them from Alpha Vantage with your key.

02

Sharing one market-data server across a team

Run it in HTTP mode behind OAuth so each client presents its own bearer token instead of everyone holding the API key.

03

Watching what the server is doing

Turn on the metrics endpoint and scrape call counts, latency and error types per tool with Prometheus.

04

Running it without a server to maintain

Deploy the stateless Lambda variant and let the gateway in front of it handle scale.

BEFORE YOU INSTALL

What to know first

Requires

uvx on PATH
ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY in your environment

INSTALLATION

Connect your client

Server setup

TERMINAL

uvx alphavantage-mcp

MCP Clients

Claude Desktop — uvx

CLAUDE DESKTOP — UVX · JSON

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "alphavantage": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "alphavantage-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY": "<YOUR_ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop — local build

Clone the repository

CLAUDE DESKTOP — LOCAL BUILD · TERMINAL

git clone https://github.com/calvernaz/alphavantage.git

Add this to claude_desktop_config.json

<YOUR_DIRECTORY_CLONED_PROJECT> is the folder you ran git clone in, and <YOUR_ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY> is your free Alpha Vantage key.

CLAUDE DESKTOP — LOCAL BUILD · JSON

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "alphavantage": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "<YOUR_DIRECTORY_CLONED_PROJECT>/alphavantage",
        "run",
        "alphavantage"
      ],
      "env": {
        "ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY": "<YOUR_ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Alpha Vantage MCP by calvernaz