Love Dumfries Version 3. Now with MCP
Yesterday was the 35th anniversary of the worldwide web’s debut. It seems like a fitting day to release Version 3 of Love Dumfries as it is built on principles of a free and open internet that benefits everyone.
We now have over 1000 businesses and community groups listed, have published over 1400 events and our first regular give-away competition is ready to drop.
In this post I want to talk about a very specific new feature and to explain our rationale for adding an MCP server. That means you don’t even have to come to the website or install the app on your phone to get info from Love Dumfries. I want to do a deep(ish) dive into some of the economics and AI aspects of running a town-wide business and events directory as a charity.
Background
Love Dumfries is operated by the local charity DPAG. All development work on the project is carried out for free. Hosting is the only real cost, in the region of £120 per year and any grants go into marketing materials and Royal Mail leaflet drops. The ultimate beneficiaries are the organisations listed and the people seeking info about what’s in town. It’s built in Dumfries for Doonhamers and visitors alike. It started life in late 2020 as a Wordpress directory that went stale. When I took on development last year and relaunched with V2 in February, I built a custom application focussed on events and activities as that ensured fresh content every day. That enabled us to reintroduce the town to the site by talking about what other people were doing rather than talking about the website. It gave us a few months to get things reindexed in Google, drop all the businesses that had closed and rebuild the Google juice under the new structure. We also started creating articles to tie in with the events and businesses in the directory.
We’ll soon raise the quality of business data and get close to double the number of listings. Work on events continues. I estimate that there are 8000 events/activities per year in Dumfries so it would be our goal to have most of those online. The result is a website of many thousands of pages and we’re approaching 2000 pages indexed in Google. The number of times Love Dumfries appears in Google search results each month now far outstrips the population of the town. All this amounts to a free resource promoting local businesses, third sector organisations and events.
Now, you don’t even have to visit the site for Love Dumfries to deliver value
Two weeks ago we snuck out a new feature that means you don’t even have to visit the website or install Love Dumfries on your phone to be able to find information today’s information.
We added an open MCP server, which means you can ask questions directly from your AI chat client such as a Claude or ChatGPT (pro) and they will query love Dumfries for data and then use the data as the basis of its answers. We’ve also made enhancements to ensure that we appear in AI summaries at the top of search engines like Google.
Why would we do that? Why would we deliver more options for you to not visit the website? Because it still serves a core aim of DPAG which is to provide businesses and organisations in Dumfries with greater visibility.
As a charity we have no requirement to drive eyeballs to the website to view ads. The site is free for everyone to use and to add a listing and always will be. We’re not displacing any commercial directories thinking of doing the same. It’s simply not commercially viable to run a paid business directory in a small town of less than 40,000 people. Now that search engines return ai summaries that mean fewer people go to the source website and more people reach for Claude or ChatGPT first, the prospect of anyone launching a paid service is nigh on impossible.
The value creation vs value capture trap
Thankfully we don’t need to generate revenue from the site as it doesn’t cost anything to develop and run. This helps us avoid the classic value creation vs value capture trap that many online businesses face. They get traction, they deliver loads of value for people, but they disappear after a year or two as they cannot capture any of that value for the business and they go bust.
We could have gone down the route of trying to implement a more chat like search experience on the site, but that has cost implications for the charity. AI costs are pretty unpredictable when your wesite is public facing and you can’t predict inputs. Basically every query would cost the charity money as it would be running on our AI account. Success would lead to higher costs and different hosting requirements with GPUs. And I honestly feel we would have been fighting a tide that goes against that. People will reach for their AI client first and that won’t lessen. By going down the open MCP server route we can craft the tools we see are useful to people, but the AI cost burden is on the user, not Love Dumfries and DPAG. Most consumers use free or fixed monthly subscription plans so their cost is actually swallowed by the AI provider at the moment. And if you’re opposed to using AI on whatever grounds, just come to the website and use it old skool, that’s fine.
Connection details for the MCP server are at https://lovedumfries.co.uk/ai
We look forward to not seeing you on our website or to seeing you on our website. So long as we’re delivering the info you need we’re happy and fulfilling our mission.