---
title: Introduction
description: looot is one catalog of paid APIs behind one token and one prepaid balance. Search, inspect the price, run a job, and pay for what completed.
---

looot is one catalog of external APIs (web search, email finding and verification, company and
people data, SEO data, scraping and more) behind one token and one prepaid balance. You don't sign
up with each provider or manage their keys: you search the catalog, read an endpoint's input and
price, run it, and pay only for what completed. A run can target one endpoint directly or a job
(`job:people.email.verify`), and looot picks a provider for you and can fall back to the next one
on a miss.

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## Three ways in

**[Web](/get-started/quickstart-web)**

Sign up, top up, browse the catalog, connect an agent from the Connect page.

**[CLI](/get-started/quickstart-cli)**

`npm install -g looot`, sign in, search, run, read the result.

**[MCP](/get-started/quickstart-mcp)**

Add `https://api.looot.ai/mcp` to Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or another client.

## How a run works

1. **Search or discover**

    Describe the job in plain words (`looot search "verify an email"`, or the [`search`](/mcp-tools/search)/[`discover`](/mcp-tools/discover)
    MCP tools) and pick an endpoint id, or run a job id directly and let looot pick a provider.

2. **Inspect the price**

    `looot inspect <endpoint-id>` shows the exact input fields, the price formula and the
    estimated maximum cost before you spend anything.

3. **Top up**

    A new workspace starts at $0. Add at least the minimum top-up before your first run; see
    [Before your first run](/money#before-your-first-run).

4. **Run it**

    looot validates the input, reserves the estimated cost from your balance (a hold), calls the
    provider, then settles. A call that fails at the provider costs $0.

5. **Read the result and the receipt**

    `looot runs get <run-id>` for the status and result, `looot runs evidence <run-id>` for what
    each attempt cost and the receipt.

## Where to go next

**[Connect your agent](/connect)**

Add the MCP server to Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT and more.

**[MCP tools](/mcp-tools)**

The 15 customer tools: search, inspect, run, runs, balance and more.

**[Guides](/guides/enrich-leads)**

Task-first walkthroughs: enrich leads, verify emails, research a company and more.

**[Money](/money)**

How the prepaid balance, holds, failures and settlement work.

**[API reference](/reference)**

Every REST route, generated from the OpenAPI document.

**[Catalog](/catalog)**

What looot covers: categories, platforms, jobs and providers.

## For agents reading this

Every fact on this site is also published as plain text for an agent to read directly, with
nothing to scrape or click through:

- **`https://docs.looot.ai/llms.txt`**, a short index of this site.
- **`https://docs.looot.ai/llms-full.txt`**, the same site with every page's content inline.
- **Any page as Markdown**, by adding `.md` to its URL, for example
  `https://docs.looot.ai/get-started/quickstart-mcp.md`.
- **A docs MCP server** at `https://docs.looot.ai/mcp`, read-only, with four tools:
  `search_docs`, `get_page`, `list_pages` and `get_navigation`.
- **A JSON index** at `https://docs.looot.ai/api/docs/pages.json`, every page's path, title and
  description.

This site documents the docs. The gateway itself publishes its own agent-facing contract,
separately, at **`https://api.looot.ai/llms.txt`** (and `/llms-full.txt`, `/openapi.json`,
`/skill.md`, `/catalog/<endpointId>.md`), which is the source this site is written from.

Before running anything that spends money, read [Before your first run](/money#before-your-first-run).

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