Developer Documentation

Watchflare Quickstart

Monitor topics, scrape any source, and evaluate relevance with AI — all through one platform. Get started in less than 5 minutes.

TL;DR

Watchflare provides a REST API with 28+ endpoints and an MCP server with 10 tools for AI agents. Authenticate with an API key via x-api-key header. Create monitoring jobs, add web sources, and receive AI-scored findings via webhooks or daily email briefings. Free tier includes 100 credits — no credit card required.

Getting Started

Get your API key

Try the Dashboard

Create your first monitoring job without writing any code.

MCP Server (recommended for AI agents)

The Watchflare MCP server gives AI agents 10 tools to interact with your monitoring jobs, findings, and briefings. Works with Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, and any MCP-compatible client.

npx -y @watchflare/mcp-server@latest start

Restart your Claude Desktop or Cursor instance after installing the MCP server. The 10 available tools include: create-job, list-jobs, add-source, run-job, get-findings, compile-briefing, and more.

REST API

28+ endpoints with dual authentication (API key + JWT), cursor-based pagination, and rate limiting at 60 requests per minute.

cURL

curl -X GET https://icygassrhskaqnrlyzsl.supabase.co/functions/v1/api/jobs \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Core Endpoints

GET/jobsList all monitoring jobs

POST/jobsCreate a new monitoring job

POST/jobs/:id/sourcesAdd a source to a job

POST/jobs/:id/runRun a monitoring cycle

GET/findingsList all findings

POST/briefings/compileCompile a briefing

GET/webhooksList webhook endpoints

POST/api-keysGenerate an API key

Key Concepts

Monitoring Jobs

A job defines what to monitor: a topic, a set of URLs, and an intelligence context. Jobs run on a schedule and produce findings.

Relevance Scoring

Every scraped update is analyzed by our multi-model AI chain (3 models, fallback). Content is scored 0-100 against your intelligence context.

MCP Protocol

Model Context Protocol lets AI agents create jobs, fetch findings, and compile briefings. 10 tools available via JSON-RPC 2.0.

Webhooks

Real-time alerts delivered to your endpoints. Every payload is signed with HMAC-SHA256 via the X-Watchflare-Signature header.

Change Detection

SHA-256 content hashing detects changes. If nothing changed, we skip AI analysis — saving credits and avoiding duplicates.

Credits System

Pay-per-use billing. 1 scrape + 1 AI analysis ≈ 1 credit. Cache hits and unchanged pages cost 0 credits.

Ready to start monitoring?

100 free credits on signup. No credit card required.

Start Monitoring Free