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Cloud audits

Log in, spend credits pay-as-you-go, and run cloud audits from the CLI, dashboard, or MCP with a shared issue tracker and published reports

Cloud audits add what your machine can’t do on its own: AI page analysis, technology detection, browser rendering for JavaScript-heavy sites, a per-website issue tracker, and shareable published reports. This guide gets you logged in, explains how credits work, and shows the three ways to run a cloud audit.

Everything here builds on the free local audit. The cloud runs the same rules and adds the credit-backed ones on top.

Log in

Sign in once so your audits can reach the cloud:

bash
squirrel auth login

This opens your browser to sign in. What runs next depends on the audit’s coverage mode. Once you are signed in (free or Pro), audits default to surface coverage, which runs the cloud rules and merges their results into the same report as the local rules, spending credits as they run. Only anonymous, logged-out runs default to quick. Want a fast, free scan while signed in? Pass -C quick. Free accounts get 500 credits a month to spend; Pro includes 3,000. See squirrel auth for API-key auth and credential precedence, and squirrel audit for the coverage modes.

Credits are pay-as-you-go

Cloud features are priced in credits, small integers rather than dollars. Nothing is charged up front: credits are spent while an audit runs, and only for the features that run. Local audits never cost credits.

Free accounts get 500 credits every month, no card required; Pro includes 3,000. Check your balance and the per-feature pricing anytime:

bash
squirrel credits

A typical 50-page audit with the default cloud rules costs around 60 to 110 credits. Full pricing, plans, and top-ups are in Credits and pricing.

Run a cloud audit, three ways

The audit is the same underneath. Pick whichever surface fits how you work.

Run an audit with the cloud rules included. Signed in, the default surface coverage already runs them (and, when relevant, pages render in a cloud browser); the flag below just makes it explicit:

bash
squirrel audit https://example.com -C surface

The start banner shows the estimated spend against your balance. See squirrel audit.

Trigger a run from app.squirrelscan.com: open a website and use its Run dialog. Cloud audits use the website’s own audit settings (which rules run, external link checking, the spend cap), not your local squirrel.toml.

Your agent runs the audit as a tool call. Point any MCP client at the hosted MCP server and it calls run_audit with the URL, confirms the credit estimate, then polls get_audit_status and reads the report. The full agent workflow is in Fix your website with an AI agent.

The per-website issue tracker

Cloud audits register the website and keep a tracker of its open issues, so findings persist across runs instead of scrolling past in your terminal. This is the backbone of the fix loop: an issue stays open until a later audit finds its rule no longer firing, then it closes on its own.

You work the tracker in the dashboard, or your agent works it over MCP with list_issues, get_issue, and comment_on_issue. Recording a decision on an issue (why you are not fixing something, or what a fix changed) keeps the context with the finding for your team and the next audit.

Published reports

When you are signed in and online, every audit auto-publishes to your dashboard as an unlisted report, giving you a shareable link plus issue history with no extra flags. Unlisted and private reports are free; only public reports cost 2 credits.

bash
# signed in: auto-publishes (unlisted, free) and prints the URL
squirrel audit https://example.com

# make it public and listed (2 credits)
squirrel audit https://example.com --visibility public

Opt out of a single run with --no-publish, or turn it off for the project with [cloud] publish = false. Published reports are available in HTML, JSON, Markdown, plain text, XML, and the LLM format by appending an extension to the report URL. See Reports and scoring for the details.

The dashboard

app.squirrelscan.com is where your cloud work lives:

  • Published reports with health scores, and visibility controls (public, unlisted, private).
  • The issue tracker for each website.
  • Per-website audit settings: rule selection, external link checking, and the spend cap.
  • Billing and credits.

See the Dashboard guide for a tour.

Keep audits running on a schedule

Instead of remembering to re-audit, have the cloud do it. Scheduled audits re-run a site daily, weekly, or monthly and update its tracker automatically, so regressions surface without you lifting a finger. A scheduled run that would exceed the website’s spend cap is skipped with a notification, never a surprise bill. See Scheduled audits.

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