Help.

How the research chat's allowances work, and how to use the archive from your own AI assistant.

What happens when I run out of allowed tokens?

Doc Depot's research chat runs on our AI budget, so every account gets a daily allowance of tokens — the units of AI reading and writing a conversation consumes. Long conversations and research-heavy questions (many documents read, long answers) use more of it.

Anonymous visitors get a small allowance — roughly a few research questions. When it runs out, signing in with your email (a one-click magic link, no password) raises your allowance to roughly ten times as much.

Signed-in users who reach the daily cap are paused until the allowance resets at midnight UTC. Nothing is lost — your chats stay in the sidebar and you can continue them the next day. In rare cases the whole archive's daily AI budget can be exhausted, which pauses chat for everyone until the same reset.

The unlimited path: connect your own AI assistant. Your agent brings its own AI, so none of Doc Depot's token budgets apply — searching and reading the archive through the open MCP endpoint is free and unmetered (standard rate limits aside). Search and the document reader never consume tokens either, signed in or not.

Connecting your AI agent

Doc Depot exposes its research tools — ranked search, full document text, page-level OCR, topics and collections — over the open Model Context Protocol. Any MCP-capable assistant can use them: the endpoint is public, read-only, and needs no account or key.

https://docdepot.itsyourgov.org/mcp

(The endpoint is always this site's own address plus /mcp — on the staging site, substitute its domain.)

Claude (web or desktop)

Open your avatar menu → Settings → Connectors.
Choose “Add custom connector”, name it “Doc Depot”, and paste the address above.
Select “No sign-in” → Add → Connect.

Claude Code (terminal): claude mcp add --transport http docdepot https://docdepot.itsyourgov.org/mcp

ChatGPT

Enable Developer mode (Settings → Plugins).
Browse plugins → “+” → name it “Doc Depot”, connection = the address above.
Set Authentication to “No Auth” → Create.

Grok

Plugins → New Connector → Custom.
Name it “Doc Depot”, server URL = the address above → Add connector.

Anything else

Add an MCP server with the Streamable HTTP transport at the address above, no authentication. The tools only read public document text, topics, and collections; they modify nothing and collect no personal information beyond the access IP.

Guided setup