Painspotter MCP

What archoor/painspotter-mcp MCP server does

The archoor/painspotter-mcp MCP server gives MCP clients access to business-opportunity research from PainSpotter. The service analyzes discussions from Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Stack Exchange to identify recurring problems and possible products. Results are arranged in three levels:

• Categories represent broad domains.
• Themes group related pain points and include trend signals.
• Opportunities describe specific product ideas and include commercial scores.

The scores cover pain intensity, willingness to pay, and build difficulty. PainSpotter also publishes weekly, long-form blog analyses that can be retrieved as Markdown.

How it works

You can connect to the hosted endpoint at https://painspotter.ai/mcp/ and provide an API key in the X-API-Key header. The hosted service exposes the complete seven-tool set. Free access includes the overview, individual opportunity details, and blog operations. Searching opportunities, listing trending themes, and retrieving theme-level market signals require a Pro or Business key.

A local stdio option is also available through the painspotter-mcp package. It calls PainSpotter’s public REST API rather than hosting an independent data source. The local version supports opportunity search and detail retrieval, plus the two blog tools. The blog operations do not require a key; opportunity operations do.

Setup and configuration

For a hosted connection, add the MCP URL to the client configuration and send an API key created through the PainSpotter account page. The hosted configuration uses the X-API-Key header.

For local execution, install the package with pip or run it using uvx:

uvx painspotter-mcp

The local configuration accepts PAINSPOTTER_API_KEY for authenticated API access and PAINSPOTTER_API_BASE to specify the API base URL. The README shows https://painspotter.ai as the base value. A key is not needed when using only the local blog tools.

Tools and capabilities

The hosted archoor/painspotter-mcp MCP server exposes these operations:

• get_overview returns category information and a trending snapshot.
• get_opportunity retrieves complete information for one opportunity and may include a related blog URL.
• list_blog_posts lists recent weekly analyses.
• get_blog_post returns one article in full Markdown.
• query_opportunities filters by keyword, score, platform, recommendation, or category.
• list_trending_themes identifies pain points currently trending upward.
• get_theme returns a theme-level market signal and its underlying opportunities.

The local package exposes query_opportunities, get_opportunity, list_blog_posts, and get_blog_post. Hosted calls other than blog operations consume monthly quota units. The documented allowances are 20 units for Free, 1,000 for Pro, and 5,000 for Business accounts; the blog tools do not consume hosted quota.

Limitations and notes

The local and hosted interfaces are not feature-equivalent. In particular, local execution does not provide the hosted overview, trending-theme, or theme-detail tools. Free hosted access does not include opportunity search or theme-level research. API keys and plan limits therefore affect which operations are available. The repository is licensed under MIT.