Deal Hunter 🛒

An MCP-based agentic AI that finds the cheapest real cost to buy a product in India. Given something like "HP Victus gaming laptop", it:

1. Compares prices across Amazon.in, Flipkart, and the HP India store (live scraping).

2. Matches the listings to confirm they're the same product.

3. Finds coupons (codes + auto-applied cart discounts).

4. Evaluates payment cards — instant bank discounts + reward/cashback value.

5. Recommends the single cheapest combination: platform + coupon + card → net price.

The "brain" is Claude Opus 5, which orchestrates the tools; the tools live in a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so any MCP client (this agent, Claude Desktop, etc.) can drive them.

Architecture

   Web browser                         Claude Opus 5
        │                              (agent/agent.py)
        │ HTTP                              │ MCP (stdio)
   ┌────▼─────────────┐            ┌────────▼──────────┐
   │ webapp/app.py    │            │ mcp_server/       │
   │ (FastAPI + SPA)  │            │ server.py         │
   └────┬─────────────┘            └────────┬──────────┘
        │                                   │
        └──────────────┬────────────────────┘
                       ▼
            mcp_server/pipeline.py   ← one shared core, two front doors
                       │
   ┌───────────┬───────┴───────┬─────────────┐
   ▼           ▼               ▼             ▼
 scrapers/  matching.py    coupons.py    valuation.py
 amazon     (same-product) (codes)       (best card + coupon math)
 flipkart                                cards.py ← data/cards.json
 hp

📚 New to the concepts here? docs/CONCEPTS.md teaches every idea used — agentic AI, MCP, the Claude API, scraping, fuzzy matching, the valuation engine, FastAPI, the SPA front-end, async — each tied to the exact code that uses it.

Why this shape? The deal-finding logic lives in pipeline.py and is framework-agnostic. The web app (FastAPI) and the Claude agent (MCP) are just two front doors onto the same engine — so the demo you click and the AI that reasons over it can never drift apart. And because the tools are exposed over MCP, you can also drive them straight from Claude Desktop.

Related MCP server: Shopping Deals MCP Server

Setup

cd deal-hunter
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env        # then put your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in .env

Optional (more reliable scraping of JS-heavy pages):

pip install playwright && playwright install chromium

Run

Web app (the showcase surface — enter a product, pick the cards you own, see the winning deal):

uvicorn webapp.app:app --reload

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8000. No API key needed — the web app talks to the engine directly (the Claude agent is the separate CLI below).

Full agent (natural language in, recommendation out — uses Claude Opus 5):

python -m agent.agent "HP Victus gaming laptop"

Just the MCP server (for Claude Desktop or another MCP client):

python -m mcp_server.server

Register it with Claude Desktop by adding to its MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "deal-hunter": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "mcp_server.server"],
      "cwd": "/absolute/path/to/deal-hunter"
    }
  }
}

The tools

The card catalogue lives in data/cards.json — edit it to add your own cards, instant-discount rules, and reward rates.

The valuation math

For each platform's listing, every card is scored by net effective price:

listed price
  − best coupon           (auto/coded)
  = after_coupon
  − instant bank discount (card, applied on the post-coupon amount)
  = amount charged to card
  − reward/cashback value (on amount charged)
  = NET EFFECTIVE PRICE   ← ranked; lowest wins

The globally cheapest net price across all platforms is the recommendation.

Important caveats

• Scraping is best-effort and fragile. Amazon.in and Flipkart rotate their markup and run bot detection; selectors will need maintenance, and requests get CAPTCHA-walled sometimes. Each scraper fails soft (returns nothing) rather than crashing.

• Sample fallback. If all platforms block the scraper and DEAL_HUNTER_ALLOW_MOCK=1, the server serves illustrative sample data so the pipeline still runs end-to-end. Tool results are labelled "source": "sample" vs "live" so you always know which you got.

• Card & coupon data is a starter set, not exhaustive or real-time. Bank offers change constantly — treat data/cards.json as a template to maintain.

• Respect each site's Terms of Service and robots.txt. This is a personal research tool; don't point it at sites that forbid scraping, and don't hammer them (there's a small retry/backoff, but no aggressive crawling).

• Not financial advice. Reward valuations are simplified; verify offers on the platform before buying.