Poke Guide (2026): MCP, Setup & Automation

Poke is the AI assistant that skips the app entirely and just texts you back. Built by The Interaction Company of California and now owned by Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent, Poke lives inside Apple Messages, Telegram, and, in limited regions, WhatsApp and RCS. It has relayed more than 100 million messages, closed a raise at a $300 million post-money valuation, and in June 2026 became the first third-party AI agent Apple approved for its Messages for Business platform.¹²³ For a social team, the interesting part is not the novelty of texting an AI. It is that Poke, like Claude and ChatGPT, can reach posterly through a custom MCP integration, which means a scheduled week of posts is a text message away.

This is a long read (about 16 minutes). The table of contents on the right lets you jump. Every stat has a footnote, and anywhere the public documentation was silent we say so rather than guess. If you only want the connection steps, jump to Connect Poke to posterly.

What is Poke?

Poke describes itself plainly in its own docs: "Poke is your AI assistant that lives in Apple Messages, Telegram, and WhatsApp, and RCS."⁴ The homepage tagline calls it "Proactive, private, personal, and right in your texts," and the product is "Designed in Palo Alto, California."⁵ Instead of a chat window, Poke's entire interface is the messaging app already on your phone. It reads, searches, and drafts email; manages your calendar; sets reminders; searches the web; and connects to outside tools, all from a normal text thread.⁴

The company behind it, The Interaction Company of California, was co-founded by Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel, who met at a middle-school hackathon in Germany and had previously built TUM Boring, which won Elon Musk's 2021 Not-a-Boring tunnel-building competition.⁶ Poke announced its funding and opened sign-ups on September 8, 2025, with a $15 million seed round led by General Catalyst and backed by angels from PayPal, Coinbase, Dropbox, Vercel, Google, Stripe, and Cognition.⁶ Von Hagen framed the pitch simply in that announcement: "Users don't want another app. They want to text an AI the same way they text their partner, friends, and colleagues." General Catalyst's Yuri Sagalov added, "The experience of interacting with Poke over iMessage is magical."⁶ Per TechCrunch's later reporting, the product itself "launched publicly in March" 2026, after which an additional $10 million came in from Spark Capital and General Catalyst, valuing the company at $300 million post-money with a 10-person team; Crunchbase tracks the same funding history under Poke's corporate name, Interaction.¹⁷ Von Hagen described the ambition behind the free tier in that same TechCrunch piece: "We really don't want to make money, but we really want to grow. We want to build a product for a billion people."¹

Poke reaches you over several channels. iMessage and SMS are the primary route, Telegram was added February 2, 2026 as a WhatsApp alternative, and WhatsApp itself is live in Brazil with the EU rollout pending, limited by Meta's platform rules.⁸¹ Under the hood, Poke uses a messaging relay called Linq, which TechCrunch describes as "a solution that enables AI assistants to live within messaging apps."¹ The clearest signal that Apple now sees this as a legitimate interface: on June 4, 2026, Apple approved Poke as the first stand-alone third-party AI agent on its Messages for Business platform, a process von Hagen said took "a couple of months" and required live human support and clear AI identification. His read on why: "I think Apple is just noticing this is the best way to offer AI."³⁹ Poke's homepage also says the assistant "proactively uses integrated services and memory" to follow up on its own, while its FAQ is careful to note that the human operators behind Poke Human, the paid tier's white-glove option, "cannot access your chat history, memories, or integrations."⁵¹⁰

Poke pricing

Poke's pricing page lists three tiers as of August 2026:¹¹

Poke's usage docs describe how the allowances work rather than publishing raw message caps: Free and Pro plans get a refilling allowance, and "Poke never stops responding when you hit your limit," instead dropping to a lighter mode; Ultra runs on credits, where "1 credit = $1," unused credits do not roll over, and auto-reload is available.¹² Poke Ultra itself launched June 18, 2026, alongside "Poke Human," which brings in real operators for complex tasks as part of the Ultra tier, and the same release window added @poke.com email addresses and personal sites at yourname.poke.com.¹³

Key Poke statistics in 2026

Poke has not published an active user count beyond TechCrunch's characterization of "hundreds of thousands of people," and no official country availability list exists beyond the WhatsApp rollout notes above, so treat both as directional rather than exact.¹²

How Poke connects to tools: integrations, recipes and MCP

Poke ships two layers of extensibility: a growing set of first-party integrations you turn on with a tap, and a fully open path for connecting any Model Context Protocol server, including posterly's.

Built-in integrations and recipes

Poke's homepage lists first-party integrations including Strava, Canva, Gmail, Google Calendar, GitHub, Granola, Asana, Sonos, Notion, Linear, Todoist, Vercel, Ramp, Webflow, Devin, Mercury, Cursor, Fitbit, Sentry, Oura, Supabase, Philips Hue, Netlify, and Outlook.⁵ Its docs separately describe "Recipes," prebuilt bundles that pair required MCP integrations with onboarding context, covering Linear, Todoist, Notion, Asana, GitHub, DeepWiki, Sentry, Vercel, Netlify, Supabase, Ramp, and Webflow.¹⁴ Recipes went generally available on March 19, 2026, and a full Outlook integration landed December 12, 2025.¹³ A recipe creator can publish a shareable link and earn a referral payout, described in TechCrunch's reporting as "between 10 cents and a dollar (based on geography) for every user who signs up for Poke via the recipe."¹

Custom MCP, three ways

For anything not already built in, Poke's docs describe adding a custom MCP integration by URL in three interchangeable ways:¹⁵

1. Web form, at poke.com/integrations/new: enter a Name, the MCP Server URL, and an API Key if the server needs one, then click Create Integration.
2. CLI, using npx poke@latest mcp add https://mcp.example.com/sse -n "My Server", with a -k flag for an API key and a tunnel option for local development servers.
3. Prefilled link, https://poke.com/integrations/new?name=...&url=...&apiKey=..., which fills in the same three fields automatically, useful for a company that wants to hand users a one-click setup link.

Poke authenticates against custom servers with an API key sent as a bearer token, OAuth with dynamic client registration for servers that support it automatically, or OAuth without DCR configured through CLI flags or a template.¹⁵ On every request, Poke sends Authorization: Bearer {access_token} along with an X-Poke-User-Id header, which the docs say exists "for per-user rate limiting" and "user-scoped data access."¹⁵ Tools sync automatically the first time a connection is created or re-authenticated, so there is no separate "refresh tool list" step. The docs' example URL uses an /sse path, while Interaction Co's own official server template uses "streamable HTTP transport" at an endpoint ending in /mcp, so a well-built MCP server, including posterly's, should work over either transport Poke's client supports.¹⁶ Interaction Co's example repository walks through all four common patterns, no-auth, API key, an OAuth proxy, and remote OAuth with DCR, which is a useful reference if you are building a server rather than just connecting to posterly's.¹⁷

Because Poke is entirely hosted, with no self-run or on-premises mode, every MCP server it talks to needs a public HTTPS address; local-only servers need the CLI's tunnel option or a deployment step first.

Recipes and Poke's own inbound API

Poke's docs describe Recipes as a way to bundle "required integrations (MCP templates)" together with onboarding context, and publishing one "generates a referral/share link" that is "eligible for payouts." The docs specifically recommend building a recipe rather than a bare prefilled link so creators "can earn revenue from MCP usage."¹⁸ Separately, Poke exposes its own inbound API for triggering a conversation programmatically: POST https://poke.com/api/v1/inbound/api-message, authenticated with a bearer key generated in Poke's Kitchen, where a message sent this way is "processed just like you texted it, but triggered programmatically."¹⁹ That is a different direction from the custom MCP integration this guide focuses on, useful if you want an external system, rather than a person, to start the conversation with Poke.

Connect Poke to posterly

posterly ships one MCP server with two transports: a local stdio package on npm and a hosted HTTP endpoint. Poke can only reach the hosted one, since it has no way to run a process on your machine, so that is the route to use here. The full canonical walkthrough also lives on the posterly MCP page and the Poke setup page.

Step 1: turn on API access in posterly

Sign up for any posterly plan, then open Dashboard, then API and MCP and enable the API and MCP add-on. It costs $3 a month on top of any plan; the Agency API tier is $29 a month. Click "Create Key" and copy the bearer key, which starts with pst_live_. If you would rather let an agent handle signup itself, the agents signup page covers that path, which we describe in how AI agents sign users up to SaaS.

Step 2: add posterly as a custom integration in Poke

In Poke, open Settings, go to Connections, and add a custom integration at poke.com/integrations/new. Fill in three fields:

Name:            posterly
MCP Server URL:  https://www.poster.ly/api/mcp
API key:         pst_live_your_key_here

Instead of the web form, you can run the CLI: npx poke@latest mcp add https://www.poster.ly/api/mcp -n "posterly" -k pst_live_your_key_here.¹⁵ Either way, once the integration saves, Poke syncs posterly's tool list automatically.

Step 3: verify with a read-only text

Text Poke: "using the posterly integration, run whoami and then list_accounts." The template repo's own guidance is to phrase a request as "Tell the subagent to use the 'posterly' integration's 'whoami' tool," which works just as well.¹⁶ A 401 means the key is wrong, and a 403 with insufficient_subscription means the API and MCP add-on is not active on your plan. Discovery metadata for the endpoint also lives at https://www.poster.ly/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json, if you or Poke want to confirm the transport and tool list independently.

No npm, no local install

Never point Poke at the npm stdio package (posterly-mcp-server). Poke cannot run a local process, so the hosted HTTP endpoint above is the only correct URL. This is also the same endpoint Claude's remote connectors, ChatGPT's developer mode, and Cursor's cloud agents use, so if you have already set up posterly for one of those, the URL and key are identical here. The full tool list and hosted-only tool count live on the MCP page and in the MCP docs.

What you can automate by text

Poke's whole pitch is that a task should not need an app, just a text. Once posterly is attached as a custom integration, six workflows we see teams build:

1. List accounts and check status. Text "list my posterly accounts and tell me which ones are connected" to confirm whoami and list_accounts are working before you trust it with anything else.

2. Draft and schedule a single post. "Find the next free slot for my LinkedIn account, then draft a post about our product update and schedule it for tomorrow morning." This chains find_available_slot and create_post, the exact example posterly's own Poke page uses.²⁰

3. Generate captions before you approve them. "Write three caption options for this photo, then ask me before scheduling." generate_captions returns options; nothing publishes until you reply.

4. Repurpose a piece of content across platforms. "Take this announcement and write native versions for Instagram, X, and Threads, then schedule them across this week." create_posts_batch handles several posts in one confirmed request.

5. Pull analytics into a text summary. "Show my last 30 days of Instagram analytics and suggest what to post next." get_account_analytics is a read call, so it does not carry the same confirmation weight as a publish action.

6. Run a standing weekly check. Poke's Pro and Ultra plans support real-time background automations, so a routine like "check my content calendar every Monday and text me if anything is missing this week" can run without you re-sending it.¹¹

Before any create call, validate_post checks the full payload against a platform's rules without spending quota, which is worth asking for explicitly if you are scripting a recipe rather than texting one request at a time.

Poke vs OpenClaw vs Hermes vs ChatGPT

The short version: Poke is the only one of the four built as a hosted, no-setup product that meets you in the messaging app you already use, which is also its ceiling, since it cannot reach a local MCP server or run on your own infrastructure. OpenClaw and Hermes trade that convenience for full self-hosted control and a wider spread of messaging platforms, including a persistent cron scheduler in Hermes. ChatGPT has the largest audience and the most built-out enterprise admin controls, but write-capable MCP there needs a paid business workspace. Read the OpenClaw guide, the Hermes guide, and the ChatGPT guide for the mirror-image walkthroughs, and see the Claude guide for the option with a free connector tier. posterly's agents overview lists every client it connects to, all riding on the same key and the same MCP endpoint.

Limits, security and gotchas

Poke can only reach public servers. Because Poke is entirely hosted with no self-run mode, any custom MCP server, including posterly's, needs a public HTTPS address. The docs' CLI includes a tunnel option specifically for local development servers, which is not something posterly needs since its hosted endpoint is already public.¹⁵

No documented per-tool approval flow. Poke's public documentation does not describe a per-tool confirmation step the way some other MCP clients do; treat any write-capable integration, including posterly, as something Poke can act on directly once connected, and phrase requests accordingly if you want a review step, as in the caption example above.

The underlying model is not named. Poke's pricing page talks about "frontier models" without naming a provider, and TechCrunch reported that "Poke turns to the AI model that best fits the task, whether that's a model from one of the big AI providers or an open source model." Since the Cognition acquisition, the companies have said Poke will test Cognition's own SWE-1.7 model at some point in 2027, but Poke's day-to-day behavior has not changed.¹²

Training and privacy defaults. Poke's privacy policy, last updated June 23, 2026, states that "data from users who select Maximum Privacy will not be used for model training," which implies data is used for training by default unless you change that setting.²³ Poke is not intended for users under 13, and EEA, UK, and Swiss users have specific rights under that policy.

One phone number per account. Poke's FAQ says plainly, "We don't support multiple phone numbers yet," so a shared team number is not currently a supported setup.¹⁰

No numeric message cap, but real limits. Free and Pro allowances refill and drop to a lighter mode rather than stopping outright; Ultra runs on monthly credits that do not roll over.¹² Regional messaging limits also apply: WhatsApp is live in Brazil with the EU pending, tied to Meta's platform rules, and Poke pays its messaging provider per user reached.¹³

posterly-side limits. Create-post calls are capped at 100 requests per hour per key, with separate higher limits for media writes and reads. API keys carry scopes, can be limited to a single workspace, and can be revoked from the posterly dashboard at any time, which immediately cuts Poke's access.

Best for, not best for

Poke plus posterly is well-suited for

• Solo creators and small teams who live in their texts and want scheduling without opening another app
• Anyone already using Poke's other integrations, like Gmail or Google Calendar, who wants social scheduling in the same thread
• Light, recurring workflows, such as a weekly content check, using Poke's background automations on Pro or Ultra
• Teams that want zero local setup, since the hosted MCP connection is copy, paste, and go

Poke is not the best fit for

• Anyone who needs a local or self-hosted MCP server, since Poke can only reach public HTTPS endpoints
• Multi-number or shared team accounts, since Poke does not yet support multiple phone numbers on one account
• Heavy automation builders who want fine-grained per-tool approval, which is not documented as part of Poke's flow
• Teams that need the widest choice of messaging platforms, where OpenClaw or Hermes cover more channels

Final word

Poke bets that the best interface for an AI agent is the one already on your phone, and its Apple Messages for Business approval, its acquisition by Cognition, and its 100 million relayed messages suggest that bet is paying off. For a social team, the practical upside is that scheduling a post never needs a new app or a new login: add posterly once as a custom integration, and every request after that is just a text.

Start on the Poke setup page or the agents signup page, add posterly as a custom integration, and text your first request, list your accounts, draft a caption, or schedule tomorrow's post, before you build it into a standing automation.

Footnotes