Cooks – open-source sales engagement (sequences, parallel dialer, MCP)

Cooks, the MIT-licensed sales engagement app in the walter-grace/cooks repository, ships sequences, a parallel dialer, and an MCP server for Claude, Grok, and Cursor. cooks-sales.vercel.app's report documents pickup detection, a dialer batch, assistant tools, and self-hosting. Ten seats are $0 a year in licenses, and recurring costs are telephony plus the server.

Revenue teams comparing Nooks or Orum, and engineers who would keep prospects in their own Postgres, are the audience. The piece covers detection, the demo batch, MCP tools, seat prices, connected inboxes, and the self-host commands.

Cooks – open-source sales engagement: what actually changed

When a carrier answers, Cooks streams the callee's audio through voice-activity detection and a few rules. "Hello?" then silence is a person at 0.8 seconds. "You've reached," a beep, or long unbroken speech is a machine, and a voicemail greeting is 1.0 seconds. Unclear audio goes to a small model within a few hundred milliseconds. Twilio's answering-machine detection runs at the same time as a fallback. The first verdict wins and the other is ignored. Carrier machine detection is 3.0 seconds on the mock carrier in the repo. Recognizers are OpenAI Realtime, a local Nemotron model through sherpa-onnx, or none.

Batch 3 of 12 uses example names, and the clock runs four times faster than real time. Maya Chen, Globex, +1 415 555 0142, said Hello? at 0.8 seconds, and the rep is talking to her. Dev Patel, Initech, +1 312 555 0199, is voicemail after "you've reached" at 1.0 seconds. Sam Okafor, Hooli, +1 646 555 0127, hung up at 0:06 because the rep is busy. Lena Fischer, Vandelay, +1 206 555 0163, had no answer at 0:31, and a callback task was made. A disposition of Meeting booked, Left voicemail, Not interested, or Hang up sends the dialer to the next batch.

Cooks – open-source sales engagement: how it works

The MCP server is a thin client over the REST API, on a laptop against a hosted Cooks or beside the API, and in that setup Cooks spends no tokens. Cooks can also run its own agents for drafts, reply classification, and research once a provider key or a local model is set, and each run is logged with its tokens and cost. A Claude Code sample asks for the three accounts with the strongest signals this week, enrolls their champions in the Q4 sequence, and calls the one who clicked twice. cooks_list_signals returns Globex, Initech, and Hooli. cooks_enroll_prospect runs three times for Maya Chen, Dev Patel, and Sam Okafor in Q4 outbound. Maya clicked twice, so cooks_dial rings her and logs the outcome. The assistant calls the tools, Cooks applies the workspace rules, and every action is recorded.

Tools find, create, update, tag, and note prospects and accounts; build, edit, reorder, or draft sequences from a brief; and enroll, pause, resume, or finish under the rules. Tasks due today can be listed, completed, or skipped. The dialer places a call, hands it to a Speko voice agent, fetches the transcript, and logs it. The power dialer starts a session, dials the next batch, and shows who answered. One inbox sends SMS and iMessage after consent checks. Email can be drafted, sent, or imported from outside Cooks. A person confirms a draft before it sends. Suppression lists, unsubscribes, and daily caps are checked on every send. A second enrollment returns "already enrolled." A rep cannot delete a sequence they do not own.

Cooks – open-source sales engagement: why it matters now

Nooks and Orum charge per seat and quote prices on a sales call. Cooks is MIT licensed, with no per-seat fee, so recurring costs are telephony and the server, and pricing is published. Nooks says "get in touch." Orum prices "based on package and users." Minimum seats are none on Cooks, not published for Nooks, and nine on Orum. Cooks connects up to four lines to the first person who answers. Nooks has a parallel dialer. Orum's is on the Ascend plan. Twilio is $0.014 a minute in the US and $1.15 a month per number. Nooks and Orum publish no telephony rates. Those pricing pages were read in October 2026, and the report says the figures change.

Ten seats are reported at $7.8k–18k a year on Nooks and $12k–24k a year on Orum. Vendr, February 2026, shows $65 to $150 per user per month on Nooks, and the list quote is said to run higher, and $100 to $200 per user per month on Orum, where nine seats is the floor. Ten Cooks seats are $0 a year in licenses. About 100,000 outbound minutes cost about $1,400 at Twilio's rate, ten numbers cost $138, plus the server. The whole product can be tried locally, on a mock carrier, for as long as the operator likes. Nooks publishes no trial. Orum caps a trial at 500 dials. Data stays in the team's Postgres on the team's server. Nooks and Orum use their cloud. MCP for Claude, Grok, and Cursor is not on their public pages.

Cooks – open-source sales engagement: who is affected

Claude Code runs claude mcp add cooks with COOKS_API_URL http://localhost:8080, COOKS_API_KEY cooks-api-..., and npx -y on github.com/walter-grace/cooks/releases/latest/download/cooks-mcp.tgz. The key is created under Settings, then API keys. That GitHub Releases tarball is the distribution, and nothing is published to npm. Claude Desktop and Cursor paste the same command into claude_desktop_config.json or .cursor/mcp.json. Windsurf and Codex use the same shape. Grok runs pnpm --filter cooks-mcp dev and hosts https://your-host/mcp. At grok.com/connectors the path is New connector, then Custom, then the URL, then sign-in when Grok asks. OAuth runs in a pop-up, each person uses their own account and approves scopes, and the host must be reachable from the public internet.

Cooks – open-source sales engagement: what to watch

Self-hosting needs Node 22, pnpm 9, and Postgres 15 or newer. Jobs, rate limits, the webhook outbox, and MCP sessions live in that database, so nothing else is operated. Bootstrap prints a workspace API key once, and the web app is at /app. Docker Compose starts Postgres, the API, the worker, the MCP server, and Mailpit. The self-hosting guide covers production notes, Twilio setup, and a mock carrier with no account. Commands run git clone https://github.com/walter-grace/cooks.git, pnpm install, createdb cooks, and cp .env.example .env. pnpm bootstrap takes --email you@example.com and --workspace "My Team". pnpm --filter @cooks/api dev serves http://localhost:8080. pnpm --filter @cooks/worker dev runs the engine, mail, webhooks, and AI.

Sign-in is API keys, OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, or Clerk SSO. Secrets are encrypted at rest with a key the operator holds. The web app lists tasks, prospects, sequences, emails, calls, dialer, practice, signals, and settings. Nooks, Orum, and Twilio figures above were read from their pricing pages in October 2026, and the report says to check those pages before a purchase because the figures change. A token's role still blocks a rep from deleting a sequence they do not own. A second enrollment still returns "already enrolled." A draft still sends only after a person confirms it, and only after suppression lists, unsubscribes, and daily caps pass.