payband-mcp

Find out what a role actually pays — including in markets where the employer publishes nothing.

Renamed from blind-mcp in 0.5.0. The Blind tools are still here (see below), but reading published pay bands is what this does, so the name now says so. The old GitHub URL redirects; the old PyPI package points here. BLIND_MCP_* environment variables still work — PAYBAND_* is preferred.

Colorado, California, New York, Washington and Illinois require a salary range on covered job postings. India, Singapore and most of the EU require none. So the same title, at the same company, in the same week, is posted with a band in Denver and without one in Bengaluru.

The band is still there. It is just attached to a different listing.

pay_bands(company="Databricks", role="forward deployed")

  101 matching openings · band width ratio x1.37 · 33 publish no range

  LEVEL            TYPICAL BAND        BANDS  POSTS  PRECISION
  mid              152,900–210,155         2      3  tight
  senior           182,000–250,208         1     58  tight
  lead             178,800–245,850         1      1  tight
  manager          211,800–291,300         4      5  tight
  senior_manager   232,900–320,200         1      1  tight

  steps: mid→senior +19.1% · lead→manager +18.5% · manager→sr_mgr +9.9%
  silent: Remote-India, Seoul, London, Berlin, Amsterdam

Per level, because one range across seniorities is a number nobody is offered — undivided, that role reads as 140,400–320,200, a 2.3x spread covering five different jobs.

typical is the modal band. distinct_bands vs postings is the honest measure of evidence: 58 postings sharing one band is one data point advertised 58 times. precision flags how much a band actually narrows things — Databricks posts tight per-level bands, Figma posts a single x2.5 band spanning its whole ladder, and both are real.

That is the same employer, the same title, the same moment — a far better anchor for an unpublished number than any salary survey, and it takes one call.

The same job, in every market the employer posts it in

Employers covered by transparency law in one country often post the same role in several. That is the closest thing to a controlled experiment you can get: same company, same title, same week.

pay_bands(company="Anthropic", role="software engineer")

  MARKET   PUBLISHED BAND            POSTS   ≈ IN USD              vs US
  USD      405,000–485,000              78   —                     —
  GBP      325,000–390,000              10   438,206–525,847       1.08x
  EUR      235,000–295,000               2   271,165–340,399       0.69x

  fx: ECB daily reference rates, 2026-09-15

The published figure is always kept; the conversion sits beside it, dated. Without it the comparison misleads — GitLab's Polish band reads as 272,000–408,000 against a US 139,200–235,200, which looks like Poland paying more and is actually 0.48x.

Reads the public job-board APIs — Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, SmartRecruiters and Workday — plus a small number of employers who run their own endpoint. Documented, intended for machines, and stable — not scraping.

Tools

Pay

Culture — not registered by default

These five are switched off unless you ask for them (PAYBAND_ENABLE_BLIND=1). A tool list is part of what a model reads before deciding what to do, and five entries that can currently only raise cost context and invite dead ends. The code and its tests are untouched, so the flag brings them straight back.

⚠️ Blind began returning 403 to all automated requests around September 2026. This is site-wide bot protection, not a block on this project: curl and an empty User-Agent are refused too, and only a browser User-Agent gets through. robots.txt still permits /company/, but the WAF does not.

We do not spoof a browser to get around it — that would be circumventing an access control, and it is the first thing their next escalation defeats. The Blind tools now raise BlindBlocked with an explanation rather than returning empty results that would read as "no discussion found".

The pay tools are unaffected. See #12.

Coverage

Measured, not estimated:

SmartRecruiters and Workday say on demand because they keep the range inside each posting rather than in the listing. Postings are filtered by title first and only the survivors are fetched, so a question about NVIDIA costs about forty requests instead of 1,693. max_lookups sets that budget, and anything beyond it is reported as not_checked_count — never as the employer publishing nothing.

Workday tenants are found by reading their robots.txt, which names the public career site in its Sitemap line. If the tenant differs from the company name, paste the careers URL or pass board="workday:<tenant>/<site>".

SmartRecruiters company ids come from careers.smartrecruiters.com/<company-id> and are also guessed from the company name. Pass board="smartrecruiters:<company-id>" when they differ.

Atlassian self-hosts and is reached by name, through its own endpoint. Its US roles publish three geographic zones (Zone A/B/C), which are reported as separate bands rather than collapsed — their union spans 1.6x and is nobody's offer.

Not covered: Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple, and most Indian-headquartered companies. Amazon and Netflix were probed and both serve clean JSON with no pay in it at all — their ranges exist only in rendered HTML. Apple answers 401. BoardNotFound explains the causes rather than just failing.

If a company is on one of these boards under a token you can't guess, read it out of their careers URL and pass it directly:

pay_bands("Some Rebranded Co", "engineer", board="greenhouse:theirslug")

Self-hosted Indian employers are still open in #13.

Install

uv sync

Register with Claude Code:

uv tool install --editable .          # puts `payband-mcp` on PATH
claude mcp add --scope user payband -- payband-mcp

Or in claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "payband": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--directory", "/path/to/payband-mcp", "payband-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Do I need to log in?

No — and you probably shouldn't. This was measured, not assumed:

• Post bodies, full comment threads, Blind's AI comment summaries, company listings, topic pages, reviews and salary pages all return HTTP 200 anonymously, with no gating.
• Driving an authenticated session with automation tripped Blind's anomaly detection after roughly six navigations: Automatic Logout — we noticed a login from a new device or location (code 2009), with a redirect to /session-out.

So a cookie buys no extra read access and costs you session stability. The only thing it would unlock is company-internal channels, which are gated to verified employees of that company.

If you still want it, set BLIND_COOKIE to your session cookie header (copy it from a logged-in browser request in DevTools). There is no login flow — the server only replays a cookie you supply, read once at startup and attached to each request. It is off by default, and the client raises immediately if Blind invalidates it rather than silently returning logged-out HTML.

The cookie itself is never written to disk, but responses fetched with it are cached under a separate auth/ directory so authenticated and anonymous results can never be served for each other. Don't commit the cookie.

Being a good citizen

Blind's robots.txt disallows /search/ for every user-agent, so this server has no search tool and refuses to fetch that path. It also:

• sends an honest User-Agent (no browser impersonation — Blind serves it a 200 anyway)
• caches every response on disk for 6h, so repeat questions cost zero requests
• spaces requests ~1.5s apart
• fetches robots.txt first and fails closed if it can't be read

Configure via PAYBAND_CACHE_DIR, PAYBAND_CACHE_TTL, PAYBAND_MIN_INTERVAL, PAYBAND_USER_AGENT.

The job boards get the same treatment. SmartRecruiters and Workday need one request per posting to read a range, so those are spaced 250ms apart behind a lock shared by all four workers — the workers overlap the board's latency without ever raising the rate we ask at — and the number of lookups is capped per question. Workday site discovery reads robots.txt and takes its word for what is public, including never treating a Disallowed path as a career site. Exchange rates are cached for a day, because the ECB publishes them once a working day.

Blind's Terms of Service restrict automated access. This reads public pages at human pace for personal research; bulk crawling is both a ToS problem and, given that Blind's value rests on anonymity, a privacy one. Don't build a dataset of posts joined to employers and nicknames.

Reading the output

Four things the output says that are easy to skim past:

• distinct_bands vs postings — 58 postings sharing one band is one data point advertised 58 times.
• precision — wide means the employer published one range across several levels, so it narrows almost nothing.
• not_checked_count — postings whose range we did not look at, kept apart from ones the employer genuinely left blank. Raise max_lookups.
• on_target_earnings_excluded — sales roles often publish OTE, which is base plus commission. Those are reported separately, never averaged into a base band.

Converted figures are estimates on a dated exchange rate, and adjust for neither cost of living nor tax. The published figure in its own currency is the fact; the conversion is there so the comparison is not nonsense.

Blind is anonymous and unverified. Weight claims by the commenter's employer (company on each comment) and treat a single loud voice as one data point. In testing, the Roku India RTO answer was corroborated by two independent commenters and an unrelated Glassdoor review — that's when it's worth trusting.

Contributing

Small project, easy to contribute to. The most useful change is a board we can't reach yet — each adapter is a whole category of employer the tool can suddenly answer for, and two of the last three releases were built by outside contributors doing exactly that. Non-US employers most of all, since markets that publish nothing are the whole point.

Next most useful: a band that's wrong. A number that looks authoritative and isn't is the worst failure this project has, and every serious bug so far has been one. Those get priority over new coverage.

Maintainers: see MAINTAINING.md.

Start with good first issues, then CONTRIBUTING.md. Issues are labelled by size (size: XS is under 30 minutes) and mentored means ask questions in the thread and you'll get walked through it. Claim one in a comment and it's assigned to you. First review within 48 hours — reviewed by running it, not just reading it.

Two hard rules, both explained in CONTRIBUTING: don't commit captured Blind pages (fixtures are generated), and don't weaken robots/cache/throttle for speed.

Publishing

mcp-name: io.github.dheerajjha/payband-mcp

See RELEASING.md.

License

MIT