Instrumentl

Limits

• The directory's tool listing understates the surface. Instrumentl documents write/delete tools and two write capabilities — saving and hiding matches — that map to none of the six listed names. Treat six as a floor.
• The write tools have no published names. Neither Instrumentl nor Anthropic names them, so this page describes their behaviour without naming them.
• Some deadlines are predictions. Instrumentl states it predicts deadlines from past cycle data when a funder has not officially announced one, and that predictions are based on historical patterns. The web app marks these visually; nothing documented says the connector's output preserves that mark.
• Deadline lists show the next cycle, not yours. Instrumentl states Claude cannot read Opportunity Status or Your Cycle, so grants you have already applied to, won or abandoned may appear alongside active ones. Its instruction is to cross-reference against your tracker.
• Duplicate saved records collapse. Instrumentl states Claude lists an official grant once with the soonest upcoming deadline, regardless of status or cycle, even where you have saved it across several cycles or fiscal years.
• Custom grants are excluded from deadline lists, because they have no official grant page with current cycle information — Instrumentl's own statement.
• Saved-grant retrieval is documented as broken by project. Instrumentl states that asking for saved grants in a specific project surfaces that project's matches saved to other projects instead, and calls this a current limitation of the connector's underlying tools.
• Hiding is session-scoped. Instrumentl states Claude cannot identify saved grants in your tracker by name unless they were saved through the connector in the same chat session.
• Hidden matches stay hidden indefinitely, per Instrumentl, including if a future application cycle opens.
• The match ranking is proprietary and unexplained. Instrumentl describes Best Match only as a proprietary ranking against project criteria. No formula, no per-criterion rationale field, and no published accuracy or precision rate.
• Funder Matches may be out of reach. Instrumentl distinguishes Opportunity Matches from Funder Matches and gates the latter to the Discover Plan and higher; nothing documented says whether the connector exposes funder matches at all.
• Trial accounts are capped at 15 records per project per session, per Instrumentl. Subscribed accounts have no such limit.
• 990-derived funder financials can be years old. Instrumentl states it retrieves IRS data within a week of public availability, but that a 1–2-year lag historically precedes publication and that the data may not reflect an organisation's most recent filings. Where an organisation did not e-file, insights are missing entirely.
• No last-updated field is documented on any connector response.
• Seat-level permission behaviour is undocumented. Instrumentl states access is tied to your login and the connector sees what you see, but publishes nothing on how its team seats partition project visibility through the connector.
• Its own corpus figures are inconsistent. Instrumentl's site cites 36,000+, 31K+ and 27k+ active grants on different pages retrieved the same day, and both 450,000+ and 550k+ funder profiles.
• No tool annotations could be read. The endpoint returned HTTP 401 to an anonymous handshake on 2026-08-19. Every listed tool is labelled "not annotated" rather than assumed read-only.
• The 401 carries no www-authenticate header, so no authoritative scope or resource_metadata pointer was available; the descriptors were located by RFC convention.
• The 401 body names an API key where the actual mechanism is OAuth.
• Prompts are none. Anthropic's snapshot carries prompt_names as an empty array — verified against the record, not assumed — and the gated endpoint blocked our own check.
• Part of the vendor's help centre is gated. The field-of-work keyword article, where a per-criterion match explanation would live, returned HTTP 401 to us on 2026-08-19.
• Accounts in Maintenance Mode cannot use the connector, per Instrumentl.
• One account per connection. Consultants managing several clients must reconnect per account.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Instrumentl Claude connector guide — https://help.instrumentl.com/en/articles/15182556-instrumentl-mcp-guide (fetched 2026-08-19; published 18 June 2026; the vendor's own connector documentation and the source for the read-only and write/delete tool statement, the save and hide capabilities, the six described capabilities, the default per-request approval and permission-by-type controls, the availability statement covering active subscriptions and free trials, the Maintenance Mode exclusion, the 15-records-per-project-per-session trial limit, the distinction from Instrumentl's REST API, the setup and disconnect flows, the sorted-by-match-score default, the tied-scores flagging, the saved-grants-by-project limitation, the next-cycle deadline limitation, the duplicate-record collapse, the custom-grant exclusion, the same-session hide constraint, the account information fields, the data and privacy statements, and the one-account-per-connection FAQ) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Instrumentl, "What are matches?" — https://help.instrumentl.com/en/articles/8218918-what-are-matches (fetched 2026-08-19; smart matching against the database, the automatic weekly match updates, the Opportunity versus Funder Match distinction and its plan gating, and the save-versus-hide semantics including indefinite hiding) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Instrumentl, "What is a predicted deadline?" — https://help.instrumentl.com/en/articles/3730725-what-is-a-predicted-deadline (fetched 2026-08-19; predicted deadlines from past cycle data, the historical-patterns basis, the purple dotted-underline styling, the federal forecast label, and the email alert on divergence for tracker-saved opportunities) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Instrumentl on sorting and filtering opportunity matches — https://help.instrumentl.com/en/articles/3827937-sorting-and-filtering-your-opportunity-matches (fetched 2026-08-19; Best Match described as a proprietary ranking against project criteria, with no scoring formula published) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Instrumentl, "How Instrumentl creates 990 insights" — https://help.instrumentl.com/en/articles/6706044-how-instrumentl-creates-990-insights (fetched 2026-08-19; IRS retrieval within a week of public availability, the historical 1–2-year publication lag, the statement that available 990 information may not reflect the most recent filings, and the missing-insights case for non-e-filers) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Instrumentl pricing — https://www.instrumentl.com/pricing (fetched 2026-08-19; the Discover, Pre-Award, Full Lifecycle and Enterprise plans with annual and monthly figures and seat counts, the 14-day trial, and the 36K+ active grants and 550k+ funder profile figures) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Instrumentl Discover capability page — https://www.instrumentl.com/capability/discover (fetched 2026-08-19; the 27k+ active RFPs figure, 250+ new opportunities added weekly by in-house experts, 450k+ funder profiles, and the 5,500 nonprofit customer figure) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Instrumentl llms.txt — https://www.instrumentl.com/llms.txt (fetched 2026-08-19; HTTP 200, 2,507 bytes; a hand-written product map naming the Discover, Apply and Manage capabilities, the 36,000+ grant and 450,000+ funder figures, and pricing from $299/month) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Live anonymous probe — 2026-08-19: initialize to https://mcp.instrumentl.com returns HTTP 401 with the JSON body stating a valid API key is required, and no www-authenticate header. No tool listing or annotations were obtainable · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Live RFC 9728 protected-resource descriptor — https://mcp.instrumentl.com/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource (fetched 2026-08-19, HTTP 200, 180 bytes; resource as a string, authorization_servers naming https://www.instrumentl.com, header bearer methods, and scopes_supported of mcp:read and mcp:write). The endpoint is a bare host, so the root and path-append forms are the same URL; the path-prefix form returns 404 with an ~85 KB HTML shell · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Live RFC 8414 authorization-server metadata — https://mcp.instrumentl.com/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server and https://www.instrumentl.com/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server (both fetched 2026-08-19, HTTP 200, 612 bytes, byte-identical; issuer, authorize, token, registration, revocation and introspection endpoints, authorization code and refresh token grants, PKCE S256, no client authentication at the token endpoint, and the same two scopes). OpenID Connect discovery on the MCP host returns 404 · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Doc discovery — www.instrumentl.com/robots.txt returns 200 and disallows a named set of AI crawlers from grant, foundation and 990-report paths while allowing the rest, and points at a sitemap; www.instrumentl.com/llms.txt returns 200 and is hand-written rather than SEO-generated; help.instrumentl.com/robots.txt returns 200 with a crawl delay and a sitemap; the MCP host returns HTTP 400 "Invalid request path" for both files. No host returned a Content-Signal header (all fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Gated vendor documentation — https://help.instrumentl.com/en/articles/6619448-how-to-select-the-best-field-of-work-keywords-for-your-project and https://help.instrumentl.com/en/articles/13908223-project-setup-with-the-prospecting-assistant both returned HTTP 401 requiring sign-in (fetched 2026-08-19), so any per-criterion match explanation they document could not be verified · retrieved 2026-08-19
• Anthropic connector directory — https://claude.ai/directory/5eb73e73-c172-433d-b3ad-b91da73c9ecd (snapshot 2026-08-16; six tool names, prompt_names an empty array, permissions "Read and write", nonprofit category, partner tier, streamable-http transport, auth_required). The page returned HTTP 403 to our own fetch on 2026-08-19, so the record is reported from the snapshot · retrieved 2026-08-16