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Price drop alerts and PDF cleanup from chat

Two jobs that never get a tool of their own: noticing when a supplier's price actually drops, and dealing with the PDFs everything arrives in. Both are one-chat jobs with MCP Price Tracker and MCP PDF.

Track prices, get the alert

"Track this price list for Acme" stores the current prices with a history. Next time the supplier sends an update, "check Acme's new list against what we paid" returns the deltas and sets pending alerts on anything that dropped. You stop renegotiating from memory and start negotiating from a record. Buying-side workflows are in price lists and rate cards; the consumer-side pattern is price drop alerts.

Deal with the PDFs

Quotes arrive as 30-page scans, terms sheets as separate files, and the accountant wants one document. In the same chat: "merge these three PDFs", "split pages 4-9 into their own file", "compress the scan so it emails". Page ranges, merging and compression are single tool calls - no online uploader, which matters when the documents are commercial.

One click, with no JSON. Download pdf.mcpb from the latest release and open it in Claude Desktop. It runs on the Node runtime Claude Desktop ships with, so your own PATH and node version never come into it.

Or a URL, with nothing installed. /mcp/connect mints a free anonymous token and prints the ready line:

claude mcp add --transport http pdf https://mcp.zovo.one/mcp/pdf/t/<token>

Or from a clone, for a client with no bundle installer. Build once, then point the client at the built file:

git clone https://github.com/theluckystrike/mcp-servers.git
cd mcp-servers && npm install
npm run build -w packages/mcp-license -w servers/pdf

claude mcp add --scope user pdf -- node /absolute/path/to/mcp-servers/servers/pdf/dist/index.js

Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf and Cline take the same two strings as JSON, in claude_desktop_config.json or the client's own MCP config file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/mcp-servers/servers/pdf/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

The npm packages are not published yet, so the npx form below returns a 404 today. It is kept because it is what that config becomes the day the publish lands, with nothing else changed; installing these servers when npx does not work yet has the whole picture.

claude mcp add pdf -- npx -y @theluckystrike/mcp-pdf

Both servers run locally over stdio. Free tier covers the core operations; Pro is a one-time payment per server or part of the bundle. For receipt-heavy month-ends, see combine receipts into one PDF.

Questions

Where do price histories live?

Locally, in the server's data directory under your home folder. Nothing is uploaded.

Can it split a scanned PDF?

Yes - by page range or per-page, which is how you separate a 30-page scan into individual documents.

Does compression lose quality?

It reduces file size for emailing and archiving; text remains selectable. For archival originals, keep the source file.

All MCP servers and prices · All guides · Buy the bundle $39

Servers used in this guide: MCP Price Tracker · MCP PDF Server — Merge, Split, Fill Forms