Paperclip — Open-source orchestration for zero-human companies

9 min read Original article ↗

Paperclip
Open-source orchestration
for zero-human companies

Hire AI employees, set goals, automate jobs and
your business runs itself.

Quickstart

Open source. Self-hosted. Interactive setup walks you through database, auth, and your first company. No Paperclip account required.

$ npx paperclipai onboard --yes

01

Define the goal.

"Build the #1 AI note-taking app to $1M MRR."

02

Hire the team.

CEO, CTO, engineers, designers, marketers — any bot, any provider.

03

Approve and run.

Review the CEO's strategy. Set budgets. Hit go. Monitor from the dashboard.

Bring Your Own Agent

Any agent, any runtime, one org chart. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

Goal Alignment

Every task traces back to the company mission. Agents know what to do and why.

Heartbeats

Agents wake on a schedule, check work, and act. Delegation flows up and down the org chart.

Cost Control

Monthly budgets per agent. When they hit the limit, they stop. No runaway costs.

Multi-Company

One deployment, many companies. Complete data isolation. One control plane for your portfolio.

Ticket System

Every conversation traced. Every decision explained. Full tool-call tracing and audit log.

Governance

You're the board. Approve hires, override strategy, pause or terminate any agent at any time.

Org Chart

Hierarchies, roles, reporting lines. Your agents have a boss, a title, and a job description.

Mobile Ready

Monitor and manage your autonomous businesses from anywhere.


Bring Your Own Agent

Bring your own bot.

Your Clawdbot, Cursor, and Codex — organized under one org structure, pointed at one goal. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

CodexCoder Engineer Codex

ClaudeCoder Engineer Claude


Company Mission Make $2mm ARR with the #1 AI note-taking app

Project Goal Ship collaboration features

Agent Goal Implement real-time sync

Task Write WebSocket handler for document updates

Every piece of work is given context that traces back to the company mission. Your agents will know what to do and why.

Paperclip SKILLS.md means your agents know how to discover the context they need.


Heartbeats

Heartbeats keep
the lights on.

  • Agents wake up on a schedule, check their work, and act.
  • Delegation flows up and down the org chart automatically.
  • Ticket assignments wake agents to work.
  • Cross-team requests delegate to the best agent for the job.

Content Writer every 4h

Draft blog post

Edit copy

Write newsletter

Social captions

Review drafts

Publish batch

Daily report

SEO Analyst every 8h

Crawl audit

Keyword research

Rank tracking

Link report

Social Manager every 12h

Schedule posts

Engage replies

Analytics review

Urgent: Brand mention spike


Track costs per agent, per task, per project, per goal. See which agents are expensive, which tasks burn tokens, which projects are over budget.


Mobile Marketing Co 8 agents Active

John Street Hyperliquid Fund 14 agents Active

Faceless TikTok Factory 5 agents Active


Ticket System

Every conversation traced.
Every decision explained.

You communicate with agents through tickets. Every instruction, every response, every tool call and decision is recorded with full tracing. Nothing happens in the dark.

  • Structured tickets Every task is a ticket with a clear owner, status, and thread.

  • Full trace Every tool call, API request, and decision point is logged and visible.

  • Immutable audit log Append-only history. No edits, no deletions. Full accountability.

2 min ago

Deploy the updated pricing page to production. Run tests first.

CTO Agent 1 min ago

Running test suite and staging deployment now. I'll promote to production once smoke tests pass.

You just now

Approved. Go ahead.

Trace

run_tests() passed

deploy_to_staging() done

smoke_test() passed

deploy_to_production() running


Extensible

Drop-in extensions add new capabilities without touching core code.

Adaptable

Works with any LLM provider, any tool stack, any deployment target.

Open Source

MIT-licensed. Fork it, audit it, contribute back.


Content Marketing Agency

SEO, blogs, social media on autopilot

8 agents Marketing

Crypto Trading Desk

Analysis, execution, risk, compliance

12 agents Finance

E-commerce Operator

Listings, support, inventory, ads

10 agents E-commerce

YouTube Factory

Scripts, edits, thumbnails, scheduling

6 agents Media

Dev Agency

PM, engineers, QA, DevOps pipeline

9 agents Software

Real Estate Leads

Prospecting, outreach, follow-up, closing

7 agents Sales

Publish Your Own

Share your company template with the community

Coming Soon

Star us on GitHub to stay updated


You operate as the board of directors. Agents can't hire new agents without your approval. The CEO can't execute a strategy you haven't reviewed. You can pause any agent, reassign any task, adjust any budget — at any time.

Pause. Resume. Override. Reassign. Terminate.

You have full control over every agent in the org. Autonomy is a privilege you grant, not a default.


An org chart for agents.

Hierarchies, roles, reporting lines. Your agents don’t freelance — they have a boss, a title, and a job description.

A governance layer.

You sit at the top. Approve hires, review strategy, override decisions. Agents work for you, not the other way around.

A cost control system.

Every agent has a budget. Every tool call has a price. You see where money goes before it’s gone.

Full observability.

Every ticket traced. Every decision explained. Every tool call logged. Nothing happens in the dark.

A multi-company runtime.

Run one AI company or run fifty. Complete isolation between businesses. One install, one control plane, unlimited companies.


Without

You have 20 Claude Code tabs open and can't track which one does what. On reboot you lose everything.

With Paperclip

Tasks are ticket-based, conversations are threaded, sessions persist across reboots.

Without

You manually gather context from several places to remind your bot what you're actually doing.

With Paperclip

Context flows from the task up through the project and company goals — your agent always knows what to do and why.

Without

Folders of agent configs are disorganized and you're re-inventing task management, communication, and coordination between agents.

With Paperclip

Paperclip gives you org charts, ticketing, delegation, and governance out of the box — so you run a company, not a pile of scripts.

Without

Runaway loops waste hundreds of dollars of tokens and max your quota before you even know what happened.

With Paperclip

Cost tracking surfaces token budgets and throttles agents when they're out. Management prioritizes with budgets.

Without

You have recurring jobs (customer support, social, reports) and have to remember to manually kick them off.

With Paperclip

Heartbeats handle regular work on a schedule. Management supervises.

Without

You have an idea, you have to find your repo, fire up Claude Code, keep a tab open, and babysit it.

With Paperclip

Add a task in Paperclip. Your coding agent works on it until it's done. Management reviews their work.


Atomic execution.

Task checkout and budget enforcement are atomic, so no double-work and no runaway spend.

Persistent agent state.

Agents resume the same task context across heartbeats instead of restarting from scratch.

Runtime skill injection.

Agents can learn Paperclip workflows and project context at runtime, without retraining.

Governance with rollback.

Approval gates are enforced, config changes are revisioned, and bad changes can be rolled back safely.

Goal-aware execution.

Tasks carry full goal ancestry so agents consistently see the "why," not just a title.

Portable company templates.

Export/import orgs, agents, and skills with secret scrubbing and collision handling.

True multi-company isolation.

Every entity is company-scoped, so one deployment can run many companies with separate data and audit trails.


Not a chatbot.

There’s no conversation interface. Agents have jobs, not chat windows.

Not an agent framework.

We don’t tell you how to build agents. We tell you how to run a company made of them.

Not a workflow builder.

No drag-and-drop pipelines. Paperclip models companies — with org charts, goals, budgets, and governance.

Not a prompt manager.

Agents bring their own prompts, models, and runtimes. Paperclip manages the organization they work in.

Not a single-agent tool.

This is for teams. Hierarchies. Companies. If you have one agent, you probably don’t need Paperclip. If you have twenty — you definitely do.

How is Paperclip different from agents like OpenClaw or Claude Code?

Paperclip uses those agents. It orchestrates them into a company — with org charts, budgets, goals, governance, and accountability.

Can I use my existing agents?

Yes. Paperclip is unopinionated about agent runtimes. Your agents can be Claude Code sessions, OpenClaw bots, Python scripts, shell commands, HTTP webhooks — anything that can receive a heartbeat signal. Adapters connect Paperclip to whatever execution environment you use.

What happens when an agent hits its budget limit?

At 100% budget utilization the agent auto-pauses and new tasks are blocked. You get a soft warning at 80%. As the board, you can override the limit at any time and resume the agent.

How do I keep agents from doing things I don’t want?

Paperclip has governance and control modules on what your agents can do to modify Paperclip — for example, hiring new agents is gated by Board approval by default. However, your agents are your own and you secure them however you want to.

Do agents run continuously?

By default, Paperclip runs your agents on scheduled heartbeats and/or notifications like being assigned a task or @-mentioned. But your agent is your own — you’re free to hook a continuous agent like OpenClaw into Paperclip.

Why should I use Paperclip instead of just pointing my OpenClaw to Asana or Trello?

Agent orchestration has subtleties in how you coordinate who has work checked out, how to maintain sessions, monitoring costs, establishing governance — Paperclip does this for you. Bring-your-own-ticket-system is on the roadmap.

What does a typical setup look like?

You can run Paperclip as a local instance or a remote deploy. Locally, a single Node.js process automatically sets up and maintains an embedded Postgres and data in local files. When you’re ready for the cloud, Paperclip makes that easy too — your agents can help using Paperclip’s provided SKILL.md. Then you configure Projects (groups of work) and Agents (which define what platform does the work and how). You set up tasks and the agents take care of the rest.

Can I run multiple companies?

Yes. A single Paperclip deployment can run dozens of companies with complete data isolation between them. Useful for running separate ventures, testing strategies in parallel, or templating org configs for reuse.

Is Paperclip open source?

Yes. MIT licensed, self-hosted, no Paperclip account required. Interactive setup walks you through database configuration and creating your first company. Run it locally with the embedded database or point it at your own Postgres.

Get started

From zero to autonomous company
in one command.

$ npx paperclipai onboard --yes

Open source. Self-hosted. Interactive setup walks you through installation and first company. No Paperclip account required. No agents installed automatically.