Pricing Time Machine

io.github.alialtunarv0.1.0Updated Oct 1, 2026

How any SaaS pricing page changed over the years, from the Wayback Machine. No API keys.

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Overview

AI-generated overview

Reads archived SaaS pricing pages from the Wayback Machine so an assistant can show how plans and prices changed over time.

What it does
The server queries the Wayback Machine's CDX index for archived copies of a pricing page, fetches the snapshot closest to a given date, and extracts amounts, currencies, billing periods and plan-name guesses. Tools include pricing_timeline (groups identical prices into periods and lists additions and removals), pricing_at (prices on the page nearest a date), compare_pricing (one page at two dates), compare_competitors (two to eight pages at the same date) and pricing_snapshots (which months or years are archived). It also ships prompts for a full pricing history report and a competitor comparison.
When to use it
Useful for competitive and market research: tracking when a competitor raised prices, renamed plans or dropped a free tier, checking what a product charged in a past year, or comparing several vendors' pricing at one point in time. It works from archived copies only, so it suits historical questions rather than current live pricing.
Requirements
Runs locally over stdio and is installed with uvx from the PyPI package pricing-time-machine-mcp; uv is required. No API keys or accounts. It needs network access to archive.org, and caches archived pages on disk under the user's cache directory.
Before you install
Read-only: it does not scrape live sites and does not modify anything. Archived pages are cached locally on disk. Results depend on what the Wayback Machine archived, pages that render prices with JavaScript come back empty, plan names are guesses, and archive.org can be slow or briefly unavailable.

Installation

In SourceWeft

  1. Open Pricing Time Machine in the dashboard and add it to a workspace.
  2. Enable the server for the chats that should use its tools.

Desktop only via STDIO. STDIO servers start a local process, so they need the SourceWeft desktop host.

Other MCP clients

Follow the launch instructions in the repository.

README

pricing-time-machine-mcp

See how any SaaS pricing page changed over the years. An MCP server that reads archived copies of pricing pages from the Wayback Machine and pulls out the plans and prices, so Claude (or any MCP client) can tell you when a competitor raised prices, renamed plans or dropped a free tier.

No API keys. No scraping of live sites. One line to install.

You:    How did Notion's pricing change since 2022?Claude: [compare_pricing → notion.so/pricing, 2022-03 vs latest]        • Personal Pro ($4/mo billed yearly) is gone; the cheapest paid plan is now          Plus at $10 per member/month.        • Team ($8/user/mo) became Business at $20 per member/month: 2.5×.        • Free is still $0.

Summarized from real tool output: archived copies of 31 Mar 2022 and 7 Sep 2026.

[Notion pricing in 2022 vs 2026, compared by pricing-time-machine]

Why

You want to knowWithout itWith pricing-time-machine
When a competitor raised pricesClick through dozens of Wayback snapshots by handpricing_timeline lists price periods and every change
What their plans looked like in 2021Find a snapshot, read the pagepricing_at returns prices with plan names and billing hints
How a whole market movedDays of spreadsheet workcompare_competitors puts 2-8 pricing pages side by side at any date

How it works

mermaid
flowchart LR    C[Claude / MCP client] -->|tool call| S[pricing-time-machine-mcp]    S --> I[Wayback CDX index: which months were archived]    S --> W[Archived page closest to a date]    W --> X[Extract prices: amount, currency, /mo /yr, per user, plan guess, context]    X -->|compact table + page text around prices| C

The server does the deterministic part (finding snapshots, extracting prices, grouping periods). The model does the interpretation: which price belongs to which plan and what a change means. Archived pages never change, so they are cached on disk (~/.cache/pricing-time-machine).

Install

Requires uv.

Claude Code

bash
claude mcp add pricing-time-machine -- uvx pricing-time-machine-mcp

Claude Desktop / Cursor (claude_desktop_config.json / .cursor/mcp.json)

json
{  "mcpServers": {    "pricing-time-machine": {      "command": "uvx",      "args": ["pricing-time-machine-mcp"]    }  }}

Tools

ToolWhat it does
pricing_timelineReads N archived copies across the years, groups identical prices into periods, lists what was added/removed
pricing_atPrices on the page closest to a date, with plan guess, billing hints, context and the page text around them
compare_pricingOne page at two dates: both price tables plus added/removed prices
compare_competitors2–8 pricing pages side by side at the same date
pricing_snapshotsWhich months/years have an archived copy

Prompts: pricing_history_report (one company, the full story with dates), competitor_pricing (a market then vs now).

Dates can be 2021, 2021-06, 2021-06-15 or latest; the closest archived copy is used and its date is always shown.

Try these

  • "How did Slack's pricing change since 2016? Show every price increase in %."
  • "Compare the pricing of Notion, Coda and ClickUp today and in 2021."
  • "What did Figma charge for Professional in 2019?"
  • "Run pricing_history_report for linear.app/pricing."

Limits (set by the source)

  • Only pages the Wayback Machine archived. Most popular pricing pages have monthly copies going back years.
  • Pages that draw prices with JavaScript are empty in the archive; the server says so and you can try a nearby date.
  • Plan names are guesses from nearby headings; the context column and page text let the model check them.
  • archive.org is slow (10–30 s per page) and sometimes briefly offline; the server retries with backoff and caches everything it reads.

Part of the keyless MCP series

Open-source MCP servers that answer one market question each, with public data and no API keys.

ServerQuestion it answers
review-miner-mcpWhat do users hate about competitor apps and games? (App Store + Steam reviews)
pricing-time-machine-mcp (this one)How did a SaaS pricing page change over the years? (Wayback Machine)
hn-hiring-trends-mcpWhich skills are tech companies hiring for, and which are rising? (HN Who is hiring)
model-price-radar-mcpWhat does each LLM cost, and did it get cheaper? (OpenRouter + price history)
launch-detector-mcpWhat is a company about to launch? (certificate transparency logs)

Development

bash
uv sync --extra devuv run pytest                          # offline tests with a mocked Wayback Machineuv run python scripts/smoke_live.py    # live check against archive.org (1-3 min)uv run --with rich python scripts/demo.py notion.so/pricing 2022-03   # terminal demo (vhs docs/demo.tape records the GIF)npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv run pricing-time-machine-mcp   # click-through UI

MIT © Ali Altunar

Source: README.md at commit d8efc18

Tools

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Version history

1
  1. v0.1.0LatestOct 1, 2026