housecallpro

Housecall Pro customer portal via curl (no MCP)

This reads the customer side of Housecall Pro: the estimate or invoice a contractor emails or texts you. It is not the Housecall Pro public API — that one serves the business running on Housecall Pro and needs an API key from their account.

No browser bridge is needed. app.housecallpro.com is not bot-walled; a plain curl gets a 200. Do not reach for fpx here.

The one thing to know first

There is no account and no standing link: Housecall Pro sends a separate, disposable link per document, so you work from whichever link you were sent.

Your link is a bearer credential. Anyone holding it can read the estimate and decline it. Keep it in a variable or a file you control, never in a command you paste into a shared transcript, and never commit it.

Setup

Two forms of link exist, and estimates and invoices use different token shapes: an estimate token is 129 characters (two 64-char hex halves joined by _), an invoice token is a bare 32-char hex string. The short link redirects to whichever applies:

# What your contractor sent (short form)
SHORT='https://pro.housecallpro.com/mobile_estimate/XXXXXXXXXX'   # or /mobile_invoice/…

# Resolve it to the retrieval token (an estimate's is 129 chars, an invoice's 32)
HCP_TOKEN=$(curl -sI "$SHORT" | tr -d '\r' | awk 'tolower($1)=="location:"{print $2}' | sed 's#.*/##')

# If you already have a client.housecallpro.com/estimates/… or /invoices/… link, just:
# HCP_TOKEN='<the last path segment>'

echo "${#HCP_TOKEN}"   # 129 for an estimate, 32 for an invoice

Read the estimate

curl -s -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  "https://app.housecallpro.com/alpha/customer_estimates/$HCP_TOKEN" > estimate.json

No Authorization header — reads carry the token in the path.

Money is integer cents. total_amount: 34639 means $346.39. Divide by 100 before reporting anything. tax.rate is the exception: it is a fraction (0.0825 = 8.25%) and must not be scaled.