What Chickpea is
Chickpea is a Slack app you deploy yourself. Once it is in a workspace, people ask for teammates in a sentence and get one: a named app user with its own handle that answers in channels it is published to, uses the accounts it has been given, and runs work on a schedule. Everything about it lives on infrastructure you operate. The code is Apache 2.0 licensed and developed in the open at github.com/pejmanjohn/chickpea.
Under the hood every teammate runs on Flue, the open agent framework from the Astro team, now part of Cloudflare. Flue handles the durable sessions, tools, skills, and MCP; Chickpea is the Slack product on top: the handles, the authority model, and the Admin panel. It runs on Cloudflare Workers with a one-click deploy, or on Node 22 or newer.
Who makes it
Chickpea is built by Paperplane Labs, a software company in Spokane, Washington. Development happens in public: the issue tracker, the discussions, the pull requests, and the contributing guide are all on GitHub, and the documentation carries a last-verified date and a list of sources on every page. The comparison pages on this site are written by Pejman Pour-Moezzi, creator of chickpea.
How it is paid for
There is no paid plan, no per-seat price, and no metering. The software is free to run, fork, and build on. A team that runs Chickpea pays its model provider directly for the tokens its teammates use, and Cloudflare for the account the deployment runs in, under whatever plan that account is on. Nothing about a team passes through a vendor in between, and nothing is billed by the project.
Where the API lives
Chickpea has a machine door, and it is on each deployment rather than on this site. Every deployment serves a Model Context Protocol server at /mcp, protected by OAuth 2.1 with PKCE and one scope, chickpea:workspace. A coding agent reads the deployment's protected-resource metadata, registers itself as a public client, sends a person through Sign in with Slack, and then has the same management tools that Admin and the @Chickpea teammate expose. Connect a coding agent over MCP walks through it.
chickpea.co itself is a static marketing site with no API. So that an agent is never left guessing, the site publishes an OpenAPI description of the deployment API, an MCP server manifest, and an API catalog, and it answers API-shaped paths such as /mcp and /api/auth with a JSON problem (RFC 9457) whose code is not_a_deployment and whose resolution says where to send the request instead.
This website
The site is one static build, rendered by Astro and served from Cloudflare Workers. Every page can be read as markdown, either by sending Accept: text/markdown or by adding .md to its path, and llms.txt is the index written for agents. The privacy page says what the site does and does not collect, and the contact page lists every way to reach the project.
