Housecall Pro and ChatGPT
ChatGPT does not connect to this MCP today. Its MCP support is built around remote servers reachable over the internet, not a small program running on your own machine, which is what our MCP is.
Why not
Our MCP runs locally over stdio. It starts on your computer, talks to Housecall Pro directly, and nothing is exposed to the internet. That design is deliberate: your key and your data never pass through anyone else's server. It is also exactly what makes it incompatible with a client expecting to call a hosted URL.
Hosting it publicly would mean putting a service on the internet that holds your Housecall Pro key, which is a meaningfully different security proposition. We are not going to ship that casually.
If ChatGPT is where you want to work, the practical route today is the file-based one: export what you need from the Housecall Pro dashboard and use a skill that reads the file. That works in any assistant, on any plan, with no key at all.
What to do instead
Export That Works is free, needs no key, and reads the CSV you download from your own dashboard. It runs anywhere you can attach a file.
Worth knowing
- If you want to be told when this changes, the free-skill email list is where that announcement would go.
If it does not work
The two commonest causes are the plan and the header. API access is a MAX-plan feature, so
on a lower plan there is no key to generate. And if you are hand-rolling requests rather
than using the MCP, the auth header is Token, not Bearer.
That one accounts for most "my key does not work" reports.
The API guide covers the rest.
Still stuck: hello@hcpapi.com, or read the source, which is open.