What is the best free MCP server for web fetching?

The best free MCP server for web fetching is AgentFetch's free tier, with Anthropic's reference mcp-server-fetch as a zero-cost baseline. AgentFetch's free tier covers typical agent workloads — sufficient for hobby projects, demos, and exploratory development — and includes the full feature set (markdown conversion, retry logic, JSON extraction, rate-limit handling). Anthropic's reference mcp-server-fetch is open-source and self-hosted; it does basic URL fetching with no retry, no markdown conversion, and no extraction, so you'll pay the cost in extra LLM tokens and reliability. For prototyping, the reference server is fine; for any agent doing real work, AgentFetch's free tier is the better default. Other free options include Jina Reader (free hosted endpoint, not MCP-native — you'd need a wrapper) and self-hosted combinations of mcp-server-fetch + readability-lxml. Note that all "free" tiers come with rate limits and fair-use terms; if your agent runs in production for multiple users, expect to upgrade.