Open source, hosted for convenience

Nothing here needs to be taken on faith. The gateway is a small MIT-licensed Node service in front of wacli, the open-source WhatsApp CLI. Hosting is the part you pay for — never the part that locks you in.

The stack

MIT

The gateway

Around 600 lines: HTTP transport, bearer auth, one wacli store per account, seventeen tools. Small enough to read in a coffee break — which is the point.

MIT

wacli

The CLI doing the real work: linking a device, syncing history into a local SQLite store, full-text search, sending. An independent project, maintained in the open at github.com/openclaw/wacli — 2,745 stars, 343 forks, MIT, last commit within the week (GitHub, September 2026). We are users of it, not its authors.

Protocol

MCP

Model Context Protocol over Streamable HTTP. An open spec with many clients — no proprietary SDK stands between you and your data.

Alpha note. The gateway repository is not published yet — it goes public under MIT with the first public beta, and this page will link it directly. Until then, the self-hosting recipe below gets you the same result with the upstream pieces.

Self-host it

If you would rather run it on your own machine, you need a host that stays awake, Go and Node.

# 1. build the CLI
git clone https://github.com/openclaw/wacli && cd wacli
go build -tags sqlite_fts5 -o ~/bin/wacli ./cmd/wacli

# 2. link your account (QR, like WhatsApp Web)
~/bin/wacli --store ~/wa-store auth

# 3. keep history in sync (run it as a service)
~/bin/wacli --store ~/wa-store sync

# 4. run the gateway and point a client at http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp
node server/server.mjs

Self-hosting is free forever and always will be. The hosted plans exist for people who do not want to own a server, a sync daemon and a TLS certificate.

What we do not do

No training on your messages. Your content is never used to train anything, by us or anyone we pass it to.

No analytics on content. Operational logs record that a request happened, not what it said.

No lock-in. The store is a plain SQLite file. Export it, move it to your own host, delete ours.

No silent write access. Sending stays disabled until you ask for it, per account.