Getting started

Sign-up to a site being watched takes about ten minutes. There is nothing to install for the app; the SDKs are one line each.

1. Create your workspace#

Go to mesharc.dev → Sign up with a work email and a password. The first account is the workspace's owner. A six-digit code arrives by mail within a minute; enter it and the workspace is yours. Until it is entered you can look around, but nothing that spends credits will start. Once you are in, turn on two-factor authentication under Profile — it takes a minute with any authenticator app.

The free tier gives 1,000 credits, once — enough to read a few hundred plain pages or a few dozen rendered ones — with the browser tier, two projects and 500 pages per run. Nothing renews and nothing is charged; when you want more, the plans start at $29.

2. Read one page in the playground#

Playground → Scrape, paste a URL, press Run. In a few seconds you have the page as markdown, and the evidence panel tells you what happened: which engine answered (a plain fetch, a render, a residential exit), the verdict (ok, thin, blocked …), and what it cost. Try a JavaScript-only page and watch the ladder climb to a render on its own; try a page that refuses and see it cost 0.

The rail on the left is every setting a project has — the same ones Configuration goes through one by one. Change one and run again. The snippet under the result is the exact API request that just ran, in curl, Python or Node.

Playground → Crawl does the same for a whole site with a page budget and a depth; Keep turns the result into a project. Playground → Map lists what a site's sitemap declares before you fetch any of it.

3. Watch a site#

Projects → New project: a seed (a domain or a URL), an optional name, a page budget. The project runs weekly and the form says what that costs at your budget. Run now starts the first run; the second run, a week later or whenever you press Run again, produces the first change record.

While it runs, Runs shows the log live. Afterwards:

• Pages — every page with its verdict, engine, credits and how the crawl found it.
• Sources — what the sitemap declared, what the links found, and which sections to keep.
• Configure — the settings, grouped, with what each one does and charges; a JSON pane; a dry run.
• Changes — after the second run: pages added, removed and modified, field changes, word-level diffs.

Using the app walks through every screen.

4. Get the pages somewhere#

Three ways, all included:

5. Use the API#

Settings → API keys → New key. The key is shown once. Then:

curl https://api.mesharc.dev/api/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer mesharc_..." -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com/pricing", "formats": "markdown,links"}'

pip install mesharc        # Python 3.10+
npm install mesharc        # Node 20+

from mesharc import MeshArc
arc = MeshArc("mesharc_...")
page = arc.scrape("https://example.com/pricing")
print(page["markdown"], page["credits"])

Every call answers with what it cost (X-MeshArc-Credits, creditsUsed) and a request id to quote to support. The full API reference covers every route; the SDKs and the MCP server wrap them for Python, Node and agents.

6. Invite the team#

Settings → Members → Invite: an address and a role. Viewers read; members run things; admins manage keys, connections and people. Members and roles spells out who can do what.

What to expect#

• A page costs what it took to read. Most pages are 1 credit. A render is 4. A page the site refuses is 0, and so is a 404. You never pick the engine; you set a ceiling.
• Politeness is real. robots.txt is obeyed, including its crawl-delay; one request at a time per host by default; a site that starts refusing is slowed down, not hammered.
• Your playground never waits behind your own crawl. Interactive work has its own lane.
• A site you have read before starts where it last answered — the platform remembers what a host needs.
• Nothing is read on credit. When a workspace runs out, runs stop and say so.