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.
Manage business goals
not pull requests.
Define the goal.
"Build the #1 AI note-taking app to $1M MRR."
Hire the team.
CEO, CTO, engineers, designers, marketers — any bot, any provider.
Approve and run.
Review the CEO's strategy. Set budgets. Hit go. Monitor from the dashboard.
Everything you need to run
an autonomous company.
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 bot.
Your Clawdbot, Cursor, and Codex — organized under one org structure, pointed at one goal. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.
Keep your agents aligned
on the goal.
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 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.
Know what every agent costs.
Control what every agent spends.
Every agent gets a monthly budget. When they hit it, they stop. Automatically. No runaway costs. No surprise bills. Hard limits, enforced by the system.
Track costs per agent, per task, per project, per goal. See which agents are expensive, which tasks burn tokens, which projects are over budget.
One deployment.
Many companies.
Paperclip supports multiple businesses in one install. Run one AI company or run fifty. Complete data isolation between companies. One control plane for your entire portfolio.
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.
Deploy the updated pricing page to production. Run tests first.
Running test suite and staging deployment now. I'll promote to production once smoke tests pass.
Approved. Go ahead.
Extensible, adaptable,
open source.
Paperclip is built to be extended. Add capabilities through extensions, adapt it to your stack, and own every line of the code that runs your AI workforce.
Drop-in extensions add new capabilities without touching core code.
Works with any LLM provider, any tool stack, any deployment target.
MIT-licensed. Fork it, audit it, contribute back.
Download a business.
Import. Run.
Browse pre-built company templates — full org structures, agent configs, and skills — and import them into your Paperclip instance in seconds.
SEO, blogs, social media on autopilot
Analysis, execution, risk, compliance
Listings, support, inventory, ads
Scripts, edits, thumbnails, scheduling
PM, engineers, QA, DevOps pipeline
Prospecting, outreach, follow-up, closing
Share your company template with the community
You're the board.
Approve hires. Approve strategy. Override anything.
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.
What Paperclip is.
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.
What changes with Paperclip.
You have 20 Claude Code tabs open and can't track which one does what. On reboot you lose everything.
Tasks are ticket-based, conversations are threaded, sessions persist across reboots.
You manually gather context from several places to remind your bot what you're actually doing.
Context flows from the task up through the project and company goals — your agent always knows what to do and why.
Folders of agent configs are disorganized and you're re-inventing task management, communication, and coordination between agents.
Paperclip gives you org charts, ticketing, delegation, and governance out of the box — so you run a company, not a pile of scripts.
Runaway loops waste hundreds of dollars of tokens and max your quota before you even know what happened.
Cost tracking surfaces token budgets and throttles agents when they're out. Management prioritizes with budgets.
You have recurring jobs (customer support, social, reports) and have to remember to manually kick them off.
Heartbeats handle regular work on a schedule. Management supervises.
You have an idea, you have to find your repo, fire up Claude Code, keep a tab open, and babysit it.
Add a task in Paperclip. Your coding agent works on it until it's done. Management reviews their work.
Why Paperclip is special.
Paperclip handles the hard orchestration details correctly.
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.
What Paperclip is not.
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.
Frequently asked questions.
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.
From zero to autonomous company
in one command.
Open source. Self-hosted. Interactive setup walks you through installation and first company. No Paperclip account required. No agents installed automatically.