Start here
There are two ways in, and which one you take depends on a single thing: whether you are on the Housecall Pro MAX plan. Both are free, and neither asks for a card.
Install the MCP
The MCP lets Claude read your account directly and answer questions about it: what you invoiced, which estimates are still open, what is on Friday's schedule. It is open source, runs on your own machine with your own API key, and it is free forever.
The setup prompt on the next page does it for you: paste it into Claude and it walks you through the key and connects itself. About two minutes, and nothing to sign up for.
Install the MCPSetup for Claude Desktop, Claude Code or Cursor.
Start with the free skill
Housecall Pro offers API access on MAX only, so the MCP is out of reach below it. Export That Works reads a CSV exported from the dashboard instead. No key, no server, no plan change, and no connection to the account at all.
Given the file, it reports what is genuinely in there, repairs the quirks that corrupt totals in a spreadsheet, and answers questions about the data.
Or read what each export contains first.
How to tell which plan you are on
There is a quick test that does not involve reading your invoice. In Housecall Pro, open My Apps, click Go to App store, and look for API Key Management. If you can open it and generate a key, you are on MAX and the MCP will work. If it is not there, you are not on MAX, and the free skill is your route. You need an admin login either way, since office staff logins cannot generate keys. The walkthrough has the exact path.
What comes after
After the MCP is answering questions, or the free skill has read a first export, the next step is a skill, which runs a whole job rather than answering one question. Most of the shelf runs through the MCP and needs the MAX-plan key.
Without that key, the Any Plan pack is the part that still works: 4 skills that read files exported from the dashboard, alongside the free one. Nothing else on the shelf runs without a key, and no plan change is needed for those 4.
Past the edge of the public API there is a hosted backend an agent can connect to for the parts the API has no route to.
If you get stuck
hello@hcpapi.com, with the plan and what the step was. Replies include the case where none of this fits the book.