alt Hacker NewsShow 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.
Comments
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.
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.
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...
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.
Cloudflare already sniffs most of the internet traffic, why not also let them see our private messages?!
What does cloudflare contribute? free hosting or
Let's centralize the internet even more, why not
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.