The hosted backend
Not another agent. A backend your own agent connects to, covering the parts of a Housecall Pro book the public API has no route to. Same agent, same prompts, same workflow, minus the wall.
The shape of it
The free MCP is the Housecall Pro public API, done correctly. That covers most of what a home service company wants, and it costs nothing.
Then you hit the edge. Equipment and its real age, a nameplate decoded from a photo and written back, what a plan customer has actually used: none of that is on the public API, so no MCP reaches it and no file you install can either. That is the wall this sits behind.
You connect to it the same way you connected the free one. Same assistant, same way of asking. The only thing that changes is what it can see.
What the public API gives you, and what it does not
Most of what a home service company wants is on the left, free or the price of one pack, and that is the cheaper place to start. The right-hand column is what cannot be done from a file or an API key at all, however good the code is.
| What you want | Public APIfree MCP | Hosted backendsubscription |
|---|---|---|
| Customers, jobs, invoices and estimates | ✓ | ✓ |
| Revenue by month, service or technician | ✓ | ✓ |
| Schedule a job, book a return visit | ✓ | ✓ |
| Price book, with duplicates and missing costs | ✓ | ✓ |
| Duplicate customer records | ✓ | ✓ |
| Renewals due and coverage already lapsed | ✓ | ✓ |
| Equipment in the book, and how old it really is Not on the public API in any form | ✗ | ✓ |
| Replacement pipeline, ranked in dollars | ✗ | ✓ |
| A nameplate photo read and written back as an equipment record Downloading the photo is public; decoding it and writing the equipment is not | ✗ | ✓ |
| Visits a customer paid for and never used Neither the export nor the API carries visit counts, so the skill works from the plan shape you state; here it is the recorded number | Limited | ✓ |
| Uncharged materials and work never billed Only if your techs use the on-site materials log; most books do not | Limited | ✓ |
| An estimate attached to the job Drafting is public; whether a plain key can attach is unconfirmed | Limited | ✓ |
| Every do-not-contact source, including those missing from your export | Limited | ✓ |
| One question answered across the whole book at once Yours works a file or a query at a time | Limited | ✓ |
| Results kept, so the same question is not rebuilt each quarter | ✗ | ✓ |
6 of those 15 rows are available for nothing or nearly nothing. Where the rows that matter fall in that group, the pack is the cheaper answer and this page is not needed.
What it is not
This capability is usually sold as a services engagement. This one is not. It does not become part of the office.
- Not a second agent to manage. It is a backend. The agent already in use does the talking and the deciding, exactly as it does now.
- Not a bookkeeper. No QuickBooks, no reconciliation, no month end. An actual bookkeeper does that better.
- Not staff training. Nobody learns a new system, because there is no new system to learn.
- Not a standing phone relationship. Connecting it takes a real conversation. After that the normal amount of contact is none. A consultant on call is a different service, and not this one.
What it provides instead is reach, kept working: the Housecall Pro changes that break integrations get absorbed here rather than surfacing as tickets.
How it starts
With an email, not a form funnel: what the company runs, roughly how big the book is, and the thing costing the most time right now. Where a $29 skill already solves it, the reply says which one instead of quoting a subscription.
Onboarding is hand-done, so this takes a small number of home service companies at a time. Pricing is per book, quoted after seeing its size and shape, and the quote states whether it earns its keep on that book.
The free and cheap routes cover the left column
Export That Works costs nothing and needs no key, the MCP is free and open source, and the skill packs run whole jobs from $34. Between them they cover the left-hand column entirely. The backend is for what is left.