How to connect ReminderIt to Claude Desktop (step-by-step)

Claude Desktop supports the Model Context Protocol, which lets you hand Claude a set of real tools. Connect ReminderIt and Claude can schedule an actual phone call for you — then list, edit, pause and cancel those reminders in plain conversation, without you opening the app.

Setup takes about two minutes. The rest of this page is the part most guides leave out: what Claude can actually do once it is connected, what it cannot, and what to check when the connector does not appear.

What do you need before you start?

A ReminderIt account and Claude Desktop, which is free and available for Mac and Windows from claude.ai/download. You do not need an API key, a config file or a developer account — the connector uses a browser sign-in, so there is no credential for you to copy or leak.

If you do not have a ReminderIt account, message +1 478-606-1901 on WhatsApp. There is no form and no card, and the 7-day trial starts on your first message.

How do you add the connector?

In Claude Desktop, open Settings → Connectors, choose to add a custom connector, and enter https://mcp.reminderit.com as the URL. A ReminderIt sign-in page opens in your browser; log in with WhatsApp or Google and approve access. Quit Claude Desktop, reopen it, and the tools are there.

Menu wording moves around as Claude's interface changes, so look for "Connectors", "Custom connector" or "Add integration" rather than an exact label.

To confirm it worked, start a new chat and ask "what's my ReminderIt account?". Claude will call the whoami tool and read back your number and saved timezone. That one call proves the connection, the sign-in and the timezone are all correct before you schedule anything that rings.

What can Claude actually do once it is connected?

Twenty-five tools, covering essentially everything the app does. The useful way to think about it is five groups:

• Schedule and change reminders — create, update and delete them, pause and resume, skip the next occurrence, set skip dates, and choose whether each one calls, WhatsApps or emails.
• See what is coming — list your reminders, show what is due next, review recent calls and whether they were answered, and check your usage against your plan.
• Voice — list the available voices, preview one before committing, set a default for the account, or give a single reminder its own voice, language, personality and speaking rate.
• Other people — add someone you want reminded, resend their consent verification, or remove them.
• Test — fire a test call for an existing reminder so you can hear it immediately.

In practice you do not name tools. You say what you want:

"Remind me to take my evening tablets at 9pm every day, London time."

"What have I got coming up this week?"

"Move the Tuesday physio reminder to 8:30 and skip it on the 24th."

"Pause everything until Monday, I'm away."

Claude reads the details back before and after it acts. That read-back matters more here than in most integrations, because the output is a phone ringing in someone's house.

What should you check before the first real call?

Your timezone, and whether the time you asked for is the time you meant. These are real outbound calls: a wrong hour wakes somebody at 3am, and every delivery draws down your quota.

Two habits worth forming:

• Say the timezone out loud the first time. ReminderIt anchors every schedule to an IANA timezone and whoami returns your saved one, but if you travel or your account was set up elsewhere, the saved value may not be where you are today.
• Read the confirmation, not just the reassurance. Claude repeats the local time it scheduled. An unintended AM/PM is by far the most common mistake, and it is obvious in the read-back and invisible everywhere else.

If you want to hear the result without waiting, ask Claude to place a test call.

Why can't Claude see the connector?

Almost always one of four things, in the order worth checking:

• Claude Desktop was not fully restarted. Closing the window is not enough on macOS — quit the application properly, then reopen it. Connectors are read at startup.
• The URL has a trailing path or a typo. It is exactly https://mcp.reminderit.com, with no /mcp, /sse or trailing slash.
• The sign-in was closed before it finished. The browser tab has to reach the "approved" screen and hand control back. If you closed it early, remove the connector and add it again.
• You are on Claude Free and already have a connector. Free plans allow one custom connector; Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise allow several. If you already have one connected, you will need to remove it first. This is a limit on Claude's side and nothing to do with your ReminderIt plan.

You can check the service itself in one line: https://mcp.reminderit.com/health returns HTTP 200 when the server is up, so a failure there is ours rather than yours.

Is it safe to connect?

The connector uses OAuth with PKCE, which means no long-lived key exists on your machine to be copied or committed to a repo. You authorise ReminderIt in a browser, Claude receives a token scoped to your account, and you can revoke it from Claude's connector settings at any time.

Claude sees what the tools return — your reminders, their schedules, your recent call history and your usage — and nothing else in your account. It has no access to your payment details. It cannot dial arbitrary numbers either: reminders for anyone other than you have to go through add_recipient, which triggers a consent verification call to that person before any reminder is delivered to them. That check happens on ReminderIt's side, so no amount of clever prompting gets around it.

What if you are not using Claude Desktop?

The same server works with any MCP client — Claude Code, ChatGPT's developer mode, Cursor and others all speak the protocol. Point them at https://mcp.reminderit.com and the sign-in flow is identical.

If you would rather run it yourself, the server is published on PyPI as reminderit-mcp and takes a ReminderIt API key instead of the browser flow, which suits a headless box or CI. That path is documented at reminderit.com/developers/api, along with the REST API underneath it if you would rather skip MCP entirely and call the endpoints directly.