Price terms as published

Each line is the vendor’s own wording, split from the price capture checked on 2026-10-09. Nothing here is rounded, converted or re-worded — the full sentences stay in the review below. Lines that carry only a price continue the plan named on the line above, in the vendor’s own order.

3 price terms for Coucou
#Plan / termChecked
1Free (open source, MIT)2026-10-09
2no pricing page2026-10-09
3iPhone beta free on TestFlight2026-10-09

The short version

Coucou is a small desktop app whose entire reason to exist is one gap in agent workflows: the coding agent runs in a terminal, you do not, and the moment it needs permission you are looking somewhere else. It puts a character — Mochi, a small square with eyes — inside the notch on a Mac (or pinned to the top edge of the screen on Windows and Linux), shows what each session is reading, editing and running, and puts Allow / Deny buttons in that notch so the answer takes a click instead of a window switch.

It is free, MIT-licensed, and has no pricing page: the project’s own site says “Free and open source,” and github.com/Louis-CFM/coucou carries the code under MIT with the name, the character and the sounds retained by the author. There is no account, no telemetry and no sign-in — API keys you plug into its chat sit in the macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager or the Linux Secret Service (README, captured 2026-10-09).

The project is twelve days old and moving fast: the repository was created 2026-09-27, was last pushed 2026-10-09, and had shipped Mac releases 0.1.1 (Oct 2) through 0.2.3 (Oct 8) plus a Windows/Linux line that reached 0.3.0 on Oct 9 in that window.

What it actually does

Live session pills. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, Copilot CLI, Muse Code, OpenCode, Amp, Hermes and Claude Desktop each get a pill in the notch showing the session step by step; file edits appear in a ticker as +N −M counts you can tap to read as a full diff. Any other agent can join by tagging its hook payload with coucou_agent, which is how the project documents third-party support.

Approvals in the notch. Claude Code permission requests surface as Allow / Deny / Always, AskUserQuestion prompts render their choices (single or multi-select, up to four questions) directly in the notch, and Codex gets Allow / Deny as well. “Reply in terminal” falls back to the CLI when you would rather type. On macOS you can jump straight to the terminal window that session belongs to.

Chat with your own keys. The chat box talks to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI or a local model (Ollama / LM Studio); cloud providers use your own API key, local ones connect to a server on your machine. Claude and Codex plan-usage pills read your 5-hour and weekly limits from the CLI (macOS, GitHub build, Pro/Max Claude plans only).

Services, music, and a weekly recap. Lightweight pollers for GitHub, Vercel, Stripe, n8n, Resend, Notion and Cal.com each render as their own coloured Mochi; Apple Music and Spotify pills make Mochi dance; a Monday recap summarises time coding, sessions, files and lines changed, sharable as an image and kept local.

iPhone. The Mac app does the work; the iPhone app (TestFlight beta, free, App Store “coming soon”) mirrors sessions through your own CloudKit database, shows Live Activities and widgets, and lets you Allow or Deny — with Face ID — from the Lock Screen.

Pricing

Item Price What it covers
Coucou (Mac) Free Full app, MIT source, GitHub releases; no pricing page exists (site reads “Free and open source”, 2026-10-09)
Coucou (Windows / Linux) Free MSI/setup.exe and AppImage/deb/rpm from GitHub releases; installer not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen warns on first run — the README says so openly
iPhone beta Free TestFlight, Apple-capped at 10,000 testers; App Store version announced as coming
What you may still pay Your own cost API keys for the chat providers, and the Claude / Codex subscription the agent itself already runs on — Coucou adds no charge of its own

There is no free-versus-pro decision to make, because there is no pro. The honest framing is that Coucou is a free layer over subscriptions you already pay for: it approves them, it does not resell them.

The numbers behind the download

Read from the GitHub API, the README and the project site on 2026-10-09:

  • 4,270 stars and 717 forks, created 2026-09-27 — roughly 350 stars a day across its first twelve days, which a third-party write-up tracked as “about 3k GitHub stars in its first week.”
  • Last push 2026-10-09, 23 tags, Mac releases through v0.2.3 (Oct 8) and a Windows/Linux release 0.3.0 dated Oct 9; the first Linux build shipped Oct 1 as a beta.
  • 174 open issues on the tracker (GitHub’s counter mixes issues and pull requests) — the volume a twelve-day-old consumer-facing app attracts, and a reminder that features still move between releases: several pills are marked GitHub build only, which means an App Store build would not have them.
  • Third-party coverage is real but young. PyShine published a source tour describing “a zero-dependency native SwiftUI app on macOS, a Tauri 2 port for Windows and Linux… a hook bridge that can never block your agent,” and an independent YouTube walkthrough posted 2026-09-30 has passed 5,000 views. Directory and social listings (hermes-ai.net, ToolFomo) repeat the same facts without adding user reviews.

Who this is for

  • People running Claude Code or Codex all day who keep missing permission prompts — this is the exact problem it solves, and it solves it in the smallest possible surface.
  • Anyone who leaves the desk while an agent works and wants the iPhone Lock Screen to hold the Allow button instead of coming back to a stalled session.
  • Users who care that the companion app itself is inspectable — MIT source, no account, keys in the OS credential store, hook traffic over a local socket or named pipe.
  • Not for people who want a dashboard. Coucou is a notch-sized control surface; the weekly recap is the closest thing it has to analytics, and there is no web console.

What we deliberately didn’t test

We have not installed Coucou, approved a permission through the notch, or measured whether the hook bridge adds latency to a Claude Code session. Every capability line above comes from the README, the project site and the GitHub API as captured on 2026-10-09 — an official-basis reading, not a hands-on review, and we do not score it.

Two caveats a reader should weigh without us having to test them: the app is twelve days old with several features flagged as GitHub-build-only, so the surface can change between releases; and Windows and Linux installers are not code-signed yet, which means a SmartScreen or Gatekeeper warning on first launch is expected rather than a red flag — verify the download came from the project’s own releases page.

Sources