PeoplePerHour by Cotlet MCP server

PeoplePerHour API and MCP server, self-hosted

A PeoplePerHour API and a PeoplePerHour MCP server you run on your own computer, in Python, on the session of your own Google Chrome. The same 17 PeoplePerHour tools we run in production at Cotlet: search open projects and read full briefs, search freelancers and Offers and read profiles with recent reviews, keep a project watchlist and saved searches with email alerts, see median budgets per category, and read your own posted projects, notifications and WorkStreams.

PeoplePerHour has no public API and no official MCP server. This repo gives you both:

• MCP server for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex and any MCP client, over stdio or HTTP. Setup
• REST API on http://127.0.0.1:8787/api/v1/peopleperhour, with OpenAPI docs at /docs. Setup
• Python: call("search_projects", query="web design"), plus 9 ready scripts in examples/.

13 tools read. The other 4 change only your own watchlist and saved searches. Nothing here sends a proposal or a message, posts a project, buys an Offer or pays, and no Proposal credit is spent.

It is for technical people who want to run it themselves, for noncommercial use only (license). If you want it running 24/7 on a server, kept working when PeoplePerHour changes its site, for a team or a business, use the hosted version at cotlet.dev.

git clone https://github.com/cotletdev/peopleperhour-api-mcp-server.git && cd peopleperhour-api-mcp-server
python3 -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate && pip install -e .
peopleperhour-mcp connect                          # reads your PeoplePerHour session from Chrome
peopleperhour-mcp call search_projects query="web design" limit=5
claude mcp add peopleperhour -- "$PWD/.venv/bin/peopleperhour-mcp" mcp

Contents

• How it works
• Requirements
• Install
• Connect your Chrome
• MCP server
• REST API
• Python and the example scripts
• All 17 tools
• Configuration
• Security and your PeoplePerHour account
• Errors
• Self-hosted or hosted

How it works

AI agent (MCP) / script (REST, Python) ──▶ peopleperhour-mcp on your computer ──your cookies──▶ www.peopleperhour.com
                                                    ▲
                      peopleperhour-mcp connect ────┘ reads them once from your Chrome (DevTools Protocol)

1. You sign in to PeoplePerHour in your own Chrome, the way you always do. Tick Remember me.
2. peopleperhour-mcp connect attaches to that Chrome through the Chrome DevTools Protocol, reads the peopleperhour.com cookies and saves them to ~/.config/peopleperhour-api-mcp/session.json, readable by your user only. It never sees or stores your password.
3. Every tool call is a request to the JSON API the PeoplePerHour site itself calls (www.peopleperhour.com/v2/...) with those cookies, sent with curl_cffi, which copies Chrome's TLS fingerprint. No headless browser runs.

The session lives in the api cookie, about 100 days after a sign-in with Remember me. When PeoplePerHour signs you out, the server reads the cookies from Chrome again, if Chrome is open with remote debugging on.

Requirements

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.