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Nika

For developers

The Cost of Work Index, inside your AI assistant

The Index is an open dataset: what one unit of thirteen recurring back-office tasks costs when a person does it, and when software does it, across three markets. This page is how you get it into your own tools — as an MCP server your assistant can call, or as a REST API. Both are free, neither needs a key, and every figure arrives with its source.

Install the MCP server

One line. The dataset is bundled into the package, so it answers offline and answers the same way every time — no network call, no key, nothing to rate limit.

Claude Code

Run this in your terminal.

claude mcp add cost-of-work -- npx -y nika-cost-of-work-mcp

Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code

Add this to your MCP config file.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cost-of-work": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "nika-cost-of-work-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Any other MCP client

Point your client at this command — it speaks MCP over stdio.

npx -y nika-cost-of-work-mcp

What it answers

Five tools across 13 tasks and three markets.

list_work_tasks
Every task the Index covers, what one unit of each one is, and which employee does it.
get_task_cost
One task in one market: the cost per unit for a person and for the AI employee, the ratio between them, and the source behind each figure.
estimate_annual_cost
A monthly volume turned into monthly and annual cost for both, and the difference between them.
list_sources
The official statistics behind every human-cost figure — publisher, release, reference period and a link.
get_cost_of_work_index
The whole dataset as JSON, optionally narrowed to a single market.

Or call the REST API

The same data over HTTP, static and served from the edge. CORS is open, so you can fetch it straight from a browser.

  • GET https://hirenika.com/api/v1/cost-of-work

    Every task, with figures for all three markets.

  • GET https://hirenika.com/api/v1/cost-of-work/{market}

    The Index narrowed to one market. Use us, gr or ua.

  • GET https://hirenika.com/api/v1/tasks/{taskId}

    One task, with its figures in every market.

  • GET https://hirenika.com/api/v1/sources

    The publications the human-cost figures rest on.

OpenAPI 3.1 reference

No key, no signup, no rate limit. If you build something with it, we would like to see it.

What these numbers are, and what they are not

  • The minutes-per-task figures are our own estimates, and every response says so. The hourly labour costs are official statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Eurostat and Ukraine's Derzhstat, each linking to the exact release.
  • The hourly costs are not like-for-like. The US and Ukrainian figures are gross wage; the Greek one is fully loaded and already includes employer contributions. The human side is understated in two of the three markets.
  • For nine of the thirteen tasks in the Ukrainian market, a person is cheaper per unit than the AI employee. Those rows come back exactly like the others — the tools will tell you when we are the expensive option.

Read the full methodology in the Cost of Work Index

Licence

The data is published under CC BY 4.0. Use it, quote it, build on it — cite it as: The Cost of Work Index v2026.3, Nika, hirenika.com/cost-of-work.