Deploy and Host steno-personal on Railway

Your Telegram and WhatsApp conversations, connected to your AI agents.

One click gives you a running instance: a service built from the project's Dockerfile, a 5 GB volume at /data, and a public URL. Open that URL as soon as the deploy is green — it lands on Setup. Pair a channel, save the access key it hands you (shown once), and point your agent at https://your-app.up.railway.app/mcp with that key as a bearer token.

About Hosting steno-personal

Your conversations from both apps live in a single SQLite file on the volume and stay current as new messages arrive. Agents reach them over MCP and can only read: the code has no path that sends a message, marks a chat read, sets your presence, or changes your profile. No bot, no second phone number, no account with anyone but Railway.

Read-only by construction. Every MCP tool declares itself read-only; there is no send path to switch off.
Yours. One container, one volume, one file. Two things can leave the machine and both are documented: enrichment (off until you add an OpenRouter key) and anonymous usage events (off with DO_NOT_TRACK=1).
Agent-ready. Seven tools to list, search and read chats, fetch an attachment, list your address book, and ask which accounts are connected. Works with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and anything that speaks MCP.

What it costs. Railway's Hobby plan is $5 a month and includes $5 of usage, which one instance sitting quietly should stay inside. The free trial and Free plan cap a volume at 0.5 GB and this template asks for 5 GB, so plan on Hobby.

Why Deploy steno-personal on Railway?

Agents have no way into your personal Telegram or WhatsApp. This gives them one, on a machine you do not have to leave switched on: Railway supplies the always-on host, the persistent volume and the public URL, and the template generates a fresh SECRET_KEY for every deploy. Nothing of yours touches a server of ours.

Pair Telegram here. WhatsApp connects through an unofficial client and your number can be restricted or banned; a cloud host is where that is most likely. Read the WhatsApp paragraph in the README before pairing it anywhere, and prefer a machine at home for WhatsApp.

Claim it promptly. The URL is public. Until you finish Setup, whoever reaches it first can pair an account; once you have your key, an access key (or a passkey) is what stands between the internet and your archive.

Common Use Cases

Ask Claude or Cursor "what did Ada and I agree on last week?" and get an answer from what was actually said, not what you pasted into the prompt.
Search across both apps at once — one person, one thread of context, whether they wrote from Telegram or WhatsApp.
Give a work agent channel: whatsapp or kind: group in its instructions and keep it in its lane; the tools take those filters.
Read an attachment: images come back as image content the agent can look at.

Dependencies for steno-personal Hosting

A Telegram account, and optionally a WhatsApp number, that you own and pair by scanning a QR code from your phone.
An MCP-capable agent: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any client that speaks Streamable HTTP with a bearer header.
Optional: an OpenRouter key, added in Settings, if you want image text and voice-note transcription. Leave it out and nothing leaves the machine.

Deployment Dependencies

steno-personal is not affiliated with Telegram, WhatsApp, or Meta. Licensed AGPL-3.0.