SnoopScan

SnoopScan

Turn any public page into clean markdown, structured JSON, or a schema you define — including the pages that block everything else. An MCP server for AI agents, a REST API, and SDKs.

This repository is SnoopScan's open core. It runs on its own, and the hosted API at snoopscan.com adds the parts that are not here. See Open source vs hosted API.

Set up in your AI chat

Paste this into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code or any AI agent:

Read and follow https://snoopscan.com/agent-onboarding/SKILL.md

Your agent reads the guide and does every step. When your browser opens, sign in or create a free account (1,500 credits a month, no card) and press Approve. That's it: ask it to read a page.

In Claude Code you can install the SnoopScan plugin instead, which brings SnoopScan's skills and its MCP server. Type these in Claude Code's chat:

/plugin marketplace add SnoopScan/snoopscan-core
/plugin install snoopscan@snoopscan

The Claude app and ChatGPT connect by signing in, with no key to copy: add a custom connector (Claude) or a developer-mode app (ChatGPT) with the address https://api.snoopscan.com/mcp-oauth. Steps for every client are at snoopscan.com/integrations.

Use it from your code

The examples below call the hosted API and read your key from SNOOPSCAN_API_KEY. Create one at snoopscan.com/app/keys, or let your agent fetch it for you with the setup above.

No key yet? /v1/scrape, /v1/search and /v1/parse also work with no Authorization header: 20 free calls a day per IP address, for pages that load without a browser. Every answer says how many free calls are left.

curl

curl -X POST https://api.snoopscan.com/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SNOOPSCAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com/", "formats": ["markdown", "links"]}'

Python

pip install snoopscan

import os
from snoopscan import SnoopScan

snoop = SnoopScan(api_key=os.environ["SNOOPSCAN_API_KEY"])
print(snoop.scrape("https://example.com/").markdown)

JavaScript / TypeScript

npm install snoopscan

import { SnoopScan } from 'snoopscan';

const snoop = new SnoopScan({ apiKey: process.env.SNOOPSCAN_API_KEY! });
console.log((await snoop.scrape('https://example.com/')).markdown);

Other languages

Every SDK has the same methods, the same error codes and the same retry rules, and reads SNOOPSCAN_API_KEY from the environment when no key is passed. Each directory's README covers every method.

Features

• Clean output: markdown, HTML, links, screenshots, or JSON in your own schema.
• Handles the hard pages: JavaScript rendering, blocked pages and proxies, with no setup (hosted API).
• Whole sites: crawl a site, map its URLs, or batch thousands of URLs as one job.
• Structured data: fill a JSON schema or a named template, with a confidence score per page.
• Stores and blogs in one call: a store's whole product catalog or a blog's posts, without a crawl.
• Pay for results: failed requests cost nothing, and every response carries a cost object.
• Agent ready: every endpoint is also an MCP tool.

Open source vs hosted API

This repository contains:

• the REST API
• extraction
• block detection
• crawling
• the MCP server
• HTTP fetching
• storage
• the client SDKs: Python, JS/TS, PHP, Go, Ruby, Java, .NET, Rust and Elixir

The hosted API at snoopscan.com adds:

• browser rendering
• proxies and anti-bot handling
• lead generation

A self-hosted copy reads pages over HTTP. A page that needs a browser comes back as BLOCKED, never as an empty success. The hosted API's free plan includes 1,500 credits a month.

MCP server

Every endpoint is also an MCP tool, so an agent can call them directly with no glue code. The hosted server is https://api.snoopscan.com/mcp (streamable HTTP, Authorization: Bearer <key>), and https://api.snoopscan.com/mcp-oauth signs in instead of taking a key. Connected to /mcp with no key at all, an agent can try scrape, search and parse on the same free daily trial as REST; every other tool asks for a free key. The easiest setup is the one line above: your agent follows the agent onboarding guide, which covers Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, the Claude app, ChatGPT and any other client that speaks streamable HTTP.

Tools

• Pages: scrape, fetchMore, search, parse, extract, checkChanges
• Sites: map, crawl, crawlStatus, crawlPages, listProducts, listPosts
• Domains: domain, domainReport, domainSnapshots, domainScreen
• Companies and leads: company, findContacts, people, hiring, findLeads, leadsStatus

The product and post listings, the domain report, its snapshots, the domain screen, and the company, contact, people, hiring and lead tools need the hosted API. This repository answers them with a plain "not available on this deployment".

Every tool has a title and read-only / destructive labels. None of them submits, posts or buys anything.

Limits

The tools are designed to keep an agent's context small:

• Every content tool takes a maxChars budget.
• Truncation is always visible and returns a continuation token.
• Crawl tools never inline page bodies.
• Guardrails cap pages per session, concurrent crawls, crawl size and bandwidth.
• Every refusal explains the limit, so an agent can adapt instead of retrying blindly.
• executeJavascript is not exposed over MCP at any level.

API endpoints

POST /v1/scrape      one URL -> markdown, html, links, screenshot, json
                     (+ `actions`: click, type, scroll, then read the result)
POST /v1/crawl       a whole site, page by page
POST /v1/map         every URL on a site, ordered by relevance
POST /v1/search      the web, with the results scraped
POST /v1/extract     your JSON schema — or a named template — filled from the page
GET  /v1/templates   the named templates (product, article, jobPosting, …) and their fields
POST /v1/batch/scrape  many URLs, one job
POST /v1/parse       a PDF, DOCX or XLSX as markdown
POST /v1/monitor     watch URLs on a schedule, webhook on change
POST /v1/products    a store's whole product catalog
POST /v1/posts       every post from a blog or forum
POST /v1/company     enrich one company from its own site
POST /v1/domain      a domain's registration, DNS and backlinks
POST /v1/domain/report  a buyer's report on a domain (hosted API)
POST /v1/domain/screen  which of up to 500 names can be registered (hosted API)
POST /v1/places/search  local business listings, with contacts
POST /v1/leads       businesses by trade and town, with their contacts (hosted API)

Every page includes metadata.platform, the platform that built it, and every response carries a cost object.

Extract data with a schema

curl -X POST https://api.snoopscan.com/v1/extract \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SNOOPSCAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "urls": ["https://example.com/product/1"],
        "schema": {"type": "object",
                   "properties": {"name":  {"type": "string"},
                                  "price": {"type": "string"}}}
      }'

Monitor a page for changes

This checks the page every 60 minutes and sends a webhook when it changes.

curl -X POST https://api.snoopscan.com/v1/monitor \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SNOOPSCAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://example.com/pricing"],
       "intervalMinutes": 60,
       "webhook": "https://your.app/hook"}'

Development

Set up and run the engine locally:

uv venv --python 3.12 && uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
uv pip install -e sdk/python --python .venv/bin/python
cp .env.example .env && createdb scraping_engine && .venv/bin/alembic upgrade head
.venv/bin/python tools/create_key.py "local-dev" --rpm 600
.venv/bin/uvicorn engine.api.app:app --reload --port 8099

The JS/TS SDK is in sdk/js and builds on its own:

cd sdk/js && npm install && npm run build && npm test

The other SDKs build the same way, each in its own directory with its own toolchain, and each README's Development section has the command. Their dependency licenses are checked by sdk/check_licences.py:

python3 sdk/check_licences.py rust     # after the SDK's own tests have run

Run the tests, lint and type checks:

.venv/bin/pytest engine/tests -q
.venv/bin/ruff check engine tools && .venv/bin/mypy --strict engine/core

Dependency licenses

Every dependency must be MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC or MPL-2.0. The check is blocking: a build that pulls in any other license fails. It also runs weekly, because a transitive dependency can change its license.

.venv/bin/pip-licenses --format=json > licences.json \
  && .venv/bin/python tools/check_licences.py licences.json

Two results of this rule are already in the code. psycopg2 (LGPL) is not used, and Alembic migrates through asyncpg instead. tld, which comes in as a transitive dependency, has a recorded allowlist entry that names which branch of its tri-license we use.

Contributing

Contributions must follow three rules:

1. Clean-room implementation. Do not use code from any AGPL, GPL or SSPL project. The API mirrors the option names common in this category, since interface compatibility is legitimate, but the implementation is independent.
2. The license check is blocking, not advisory.
3. No personal or identifying data in the repo. Configuration comes from environment variables only. Every fixture uses example.com or .invalid.

License

The engine is licensed under AGPL-3.0. If you run a modified version as a network service, section 13 requires you to offer its source to your users. The running instance does this itself at GET /v1/source, so it does not depend on a document that a fork might forget to update.

Every SDK in sdk/ is MIT. An AGPL client library would push the copyleft into every application that imports it, which is not what a client library is for.

Some modules are proprietary and are not covered by the AGPL: browser rendering, proxy and anti-bot handling, and lead generation. They are listed in LICENSE-PROPRIETARY, which is generated from engine/licensing.py. CI enforces the split: tools/check_split.py fails the build if any public module depends on one of them.