Poe’s Reverse-Engineered Python API Is a Ghost Town

What it does poe-api was a Python client that reverse-engineered Quora’s Poe platform, letting you programmatically send messages, stream responses, and manage conversations with bots backed by ChatGPT, GPT-4, Claude, and others. It also exposed hooks for creating custom bots and browsing third-party ones, all authenticated via a browser cookie token.

The interesting bit The library mapped Poe’s internal codenames—chinchilla for ChatGPT, beaver for GPT-4—onto familiar models, effectively treating Poe’s freemium tier as an unofficial LLM gateway. It even documented the strict free-tier rate limits in its own README, like one GPT-4 message per day.

Key highlights

• Supports proxying requests over SOCKS5 and custom TLS fingerprints to avoid detection.
• Can create, edit, and deploy custom bots with configurable prompts and base models.
• Exposes conversation history, message deletion, and full conversation purging.
• Depends on quickjs, which can require compiling from source on some Python versions.
• Explicitly warns that heavy use risks account bans; the authors recommend burner accounts.

Caveats

• The project is unmaintained and currently broken, per its own README and issue #231.
• Heavy or automated usage may trigger account bans, per issue #118.
• The quickjs dependency lacks prebuilt wheels for Python 3.11, so Linux installs may fail without development headers.

Verdict A cautionary tale for developers building on unofficial APIs: it worked until Poe’s backend changed and the maintainer stepped away. Look elsewhere if you need a living, supported LLM client today.