Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare
I wanted my humble Claude on mobile to access my WhatsApp messages but the only options I could find either required WhatsApp Business or an actual server to run Baileys on. I wanted to run it for free on ClaudeFlare and with my personal WhatsApp account, so I built this. Important feature - it connects to your Google account as well as WhatsApp to grab the names of all your WhatsApp contacts, otherwise you get only phone numbers for many of them and search doesn't work properly. This is a single user install because it's both gray area and very private - so point your agent at the repo and let it set things up.
Discussion Highlights (15 comments)
D2OQZG8l5BI1S06
Cloudflare already sniffs most of the internet traffic, why not also let them see our private messages?!
SchemaLoad
What bothers me about these projects is you are exposing the other side of your conversations to being uploaded to a 3rd party AI company who will ingest it in to their training data. You personally might not care about this privacy intrusion but the people you are messaging never consented to this.
jrecyclebin
I've been using Baileys - but it's not ideal. (Periodically you have to go manually log the bot back in.) Is there no platform that's friendly to personal bots? Or is that what Telegram is for? Discord I suppose...
goodcake3963
Let's centralize the internet even more, why not
taldo
I've experimented with some of these whatsapp-web-esque hacks (whatsappweb.js, whatsmeow, ...) and every now and then I'll get banned. It's quite inconvenient if you live in a country where WA is the universal contact channel for pretty much everything.
throwaway27448
What does cloudflare contribute? free hosting or
bitilia
While I see the security concerns I would like to point out that this project is interesting and a great stepping stone for easier to make whatsapp AI support chat bots.
pizzafeelsright
AI built me an Android gateway that can send/read text messages along with connectivity to my local AI over wireguard. If a bot needs to text me it sends an API request or it can read whatever I allow with full visibility as I have the logs and limit the access. The amount of effort was minimal. About 4 prompts to get it all working and zero SaaS, 3rd party, or purchases after the software was built.
kshmir
Interesting approach, we did kaptionai.com/mcp with a slightly different approach, the MCP runs on your own WhatsApp Web or in our own app, it can run locally or through our own bridge (which is open source as well).
101008
I am not saying this proudly, but given how important is to stay in touch with others, I would never jeopardize my Gmail account and my Whatsapp account. Understand that using a bot to access your Whatsapp account is against TOS and your account could be suspended.
buremba
I don't get how of the personal assistant can be useful without having to see my conversational data so this is great. Do you know if running Whatsapp in Cloud risks your account to be banned? I'm working on a similar tool, connecting all that data to build your context graph that knows all the people and conversations and expose it via MCP. https://lobu.ai/for/personal/ My approach is requiring you to have a home device where you keep your accounts open in a browser and observing the data from there. The same applies to Linkedin, Instagram, X etc. even reading my timeline to summarize what I need to know without me doomscrolling.
lgleason
I literally just went through it saying I was violating the TOS on my personal account for the crime of linking my Mac and IOS phone as a secondary account to my main account on my Android phone. I had been using this workflow for a few years and this happened all of the sudden earlier this month. This was using the Whatsapp official apps and recommended process for doing this. When that happens it immediately cuts your access and makes you request a reconsideration that can take 24+ hours. Some accounts get booted without this option. So if you use Whatsapp for anything important that can be a really big problem. I was reinstated, and only discovered this from going through a couple of cycles trying to add these back. So doing what you are doing with this seems almost like a guarantee that you will be perma banned.
jiggunjer
To anyone thinking of going the official route, beware twillio, their KYC is terrible.
fantasticwaddle
I've always regarded WhatsApp as a very private thing and if on the other side of things, if somebody's using repos like these and uploading my messages, you know, which as far as we know are being read by Claude and all these AI companies, the more data you put in, the more data they get inside and for their training and they could use it for, I don't know, God knows what. But I never consented to this. So the more trouble here is not that you're using it or people are using it. The trouble is that there are a lot of people in the world who have not consented to this. There are people on the other side of WhatsApp who have not consented to this. Why would you build something like that? I mean, it's just unfair for a lot of people.
neuropacabra
Free messaging MCP. What could possibly go wrong?