Charlotte On The Cheap

Reads Charlotte On The Cheap, a local guide to free and cheap things to do in the Charlotte, NC area. Everything is read-only and needs no credentials.

Picking the right tool

• What's on for a date → cotc_list_events with an ISO date (defaults to today). Each listing has its time, price and venue. Add free_only: true for no-cost listings only.
• Scan or compare a whole month → cotc_events_month_overview.
• Find articles by topic, place or text → cotc_search_posts (query, category, location, after/before).
• Read one article in full → cotc_get_post with an id, slug, or URL.
• Discover filter ids → cotc_list_categories, cotc_list_locations.

Typical flow

For "what's free this weekend?", call cotc_list_events once per date with free_only: true — the events calendar is per-day, so a weekend is two calls (three over a long weekend). Give the user the title, time and venue, and offer cotc_get_post on anything they want details for.

For a topic ("free museum days", "kids stuff in Lake Norman"), search instead: resolve the category or location id first if you need to filter, then cotc_search_posts.

Two behaviours to get right

Month overviews are previews. The site's calendar renders at most four listings per day. In cotc_events_month_overview, each day's events is a preview while total is the day's real count — for August 2026 that's 124 previewed against 510 actual. Use total when telling the user how much is on, and call cotc_list_events for a date to get that day's full schedule. Never present the preview as the complete list.

Expired deals are hidden by default. Retired offers are recategorised into an expired category and excluded from searches, so results reflect things still available. Only pass include_expired: true when the user is explicitly researching past deals or history — and say so when those results are shown, since the offers no longer stand.

Dates

Pass dates as ISO YYYY-MM-DD (and months as YYYY-MM). The tools convert to whatever the site expects and reject a malformed date rather than guessing. Resolve relative dates ("this Saturday") against today before calling.