A price monitoring API, webhooks and MCP on every plan

01What the REST API covers

The API is the same one the Pricebeeper web app uses, limited to the parts that make sense for a script or another system. A key acts as the account it belongs to and sees that account's data only.

The read-only areas are deliberate. MAP decisions, repricing rules, price approvals and store connections change real prices or flag real resellers, so a person makes them in the dashboard. Keys can't create, list or revoke other keys, so a leaked key can't mint a replacement or hide by revoking the others.

02API keys and rate limits

Create keys under Settings, API. Each key starts with pb_ and is shown once; Pricebeeper keeps only its SHA-256 digest, so a lost key can't be recovered, only replaced. An account can hold up to 10 active keys, and the settings page lists when each was last used.

Send the key as X-API-Key: pb_... or as Authorization: Api-Key pb_... . A request with a key is always authenticated by that key, never by a browser session, which is why key requests skip the CSRF check that cookie sessions need.

requests an hour on Free

60

requests an hour from Starter to Business

1,000

requests an hour on Custom

5,000

All of an account's keys share one hourly budget. Past it, requests get a 429 answer that says when to retry, and the API settings page shows request counts against the limit.

A few safeguards apply to keys. Creating one needs a verified email address, and our support staff can't create one while viewing your account. In a team, only the owner and admins create keys; a key a teammate created belongs to the account and is revoked when that teammate leaves. Teams and security covers the rest.

03OpenAPI schema and docs

The OpenAPI 3 schema is public at /api/v1/schema/ (YAML, or JSON with ?format=json), and interactive docs over it are at /api/v1/docs/. Neither needs an account, so you can check an endpoint before signing up. The schema covers only the paths keys can reach, and it also describes the repricing webhook events.

04CSV exports

Three exports download as CSV from the app or through the API, streamed row by row.

• Products: your whole catalog with source, current and target price, whether each product is monitored, and the regions it is monitored in.
• Price history: every recorded price for the last 30 days by default and up to 365, for one product and region or all of them. Each row carries the seller, price and regular price, sale flag, stock, source, listing URL and kind (a seller's offer, an ad placement, or a search listing).
• Alerts: type, severity, product, region, old and new price, change and competitor.

Any text cell that starts with =, +, -, or @ is prefixed with a quote mark, so a product title or seller name crafted as a spreadsheet formula opens as plain text in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. Numbers and dates are written as plain values. Each account can run 30 exports an hour.

05Slack and signed webhooks

Alerts can go to a Slack channel (through a Slack incoming webhook URL) or to any HTTPS endpoint you run. Free includes 1 destination and paid plans 10. Each destination can be narrowed to chosen alert types, a minimum severity, chosen products or chosen regions.

• price_alert.created for price alerts and stock alerts: price drop, price increase, target reached, sale detected, competitor out of stock, back in stock.
• map.violation when a MAP violation opens or closes (Growth, Pro, Business and Custom).
• price.suggestion.approved and price.applied from repricing, so stores without a direct connection can apply prices from the event.
• integration.test, sent by the test button.

Webhook bodies are JSON with an id, a type, a timestamp and the data. Every request carries X-Pricebeeper-Signature: t=<timestamp>,v1=<signature>, where the signature is an HMAC-SHA256 of the timestamp, a dot and the raw body, keyed with the destination's signing secret. Check it, and reject old timestamps, before trusting a request. The X-Pricebeeper-Delivery id stays the same across retries, so you can drop duplicates.

A failed delivery is retried up to 5 times, waiting 30 seconds at first and doubling up to an hour. After 5 deliveries in a row fail, the destination switches off and the owner gets an email. The last 20 deliveries show their status codes, you can rotate the signing secret at any time, and destinations must be public addresses, never private network ones.

06MCP endpoint for AI agents

Pricebeeper also answers the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the JSON-RPC 2.0 interface AI assistants and agents use to call tools. The endpoint is /api/v1/mcp/, and it takes the same API keys as the REST API.

• get_tracked_products: your products with their current and target prices.
• get_price_history: a product's recorded prices over a chosen number of days, optionally from one source.
• get_active_alerts: unread alerts, filtered by type, severity or product.
• submit_price_data: record a price your agent found for a monitored product. It is stored like any other check, so alerts fire per seller.

An agent can then answer questions such as which products have unread price-drop alerts, from your own data, or feed in prices from a source Pricebeeper doesn't cover. The endpoint has its own hourly request limit.

07Custom MCP servers as price sources

The other direction works too. Under Settings, Price sources, add the JSON-RPC endpoint of an MCP server you run, with an optional API key. During each sync Pricebeeper calls the server's get_price tool with the product's URL and records the price it returns alongside the other sources.

Server credentials are stored encrypted. Only the owner and admins can add one, it needs a verified email, and a server a teammate added is paused when they leave. Connect only servers whose operator may supply the data they return: Pricebeeper can't check a custom server's sources. Marketplace APIs such as eBay, bol.com and Kaufland are set up on the same page; marketplaces and channels lists them.

08Limits of the API

• Keys have no scopes or expiry dates: every key has the account's full API access. Revoke keys you no longer use.
• MAP, repricing and ad monitoring can't be changed by key, and billing, team and account settings can't be reached at all.
• Rate limits are per account, not per key. 60 requests an hour on Free suits a nightly export, not a live dashboard.
• Webhook destinations are capped at 10 per account on paid plans.
• Prices change on the plan's check schedule (a monthly search for sellers, known sellers re-read weekly on Starter and Plus, daily on Growth and up, the 5 cheapest every 6 hours), so polling every minute returns the same data. Webhooks tell you when something changed.

If you were planning to build a scraper yourself, the build-your-own comparison sets out what the API saves you. For the data itself, see competitor price monitoring and pricing analytics.

Questions people ask