Paperclip — runs your business

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## What is Paperclip? # Open-source orchestration for zero-human companies **If OpenClaw is an _employee_, Paperclip is the _company_** Paperclip is a Node.js server and React UI that orchestrates a team of AI agents to run a business. Bring your own agents, assign goals, and track your agents' work and costs from one dashboard. It looks like a task manager — but under the hood it has org charts, budgets, governance, goal alignment, and agent coordination. **Manage business goals, not pull requests.** | | Step | Example | | ------ | --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **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 strategy. Set budgets. Hit go. Monitor from the dashboard. |
> **COMING SOON: Clipmart** — Download and run entire companies with one click. Browse pre-built company templates — full org structures, agent configs, and skills — and import them into your Paperclip instance in seconds.
Works
with		 OpenClaw
OpenClaw		 Claude
Claude Code		 Codex
Codex		 Cursor
Cursor		 Bash
Bash		 HTTP
HTTP
If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.

## Paperclip is right for you if - ✅ You want to build **autonomous AI companies** - ✅ You **coordinate many different agents** (OpenClaw, Codex, Claude, Cursor) toward a common goal - ✅ You have **20 simultaneous Claude Code terminals** open and lose track of what everyone is doing - ✅ You want agents running **autonomously 24/7**, but still want to audit work and chime in when needed - ✅ You want to **monitor costs** and enforce budgets - ✅ You want a process for managing agents that **feels like using a task manager** - ✅ You want to manage your autonomous businesses **from your phone**
## Features

🔌 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 immutable 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.

## Problems Paperclip solves | Without Paperclip | 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.** | 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. If you have one agent, you probably don't need Paperclip. If you have twenty — you definitely do. | | **Not a code review tool.** | Paperclip orchestrates work, not pull requests. Bring your own review process. |
## Quickstart Open source. Self-hosted. No Paperclip account required. ```bash npx paperclipai onboard --yes ``` Or manually: ```bash git clone https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip.git cd paperclip pnpm install pnpm dev ``` This starts the API server at `http://localhost:3100`. An embedded PostgreSQL database is created automatically — no setup required. > **Requirements:** Node.js 20+, pnpm 9.15+
## FAQ **What does a typical setup look like?** Locally, a single Node.js process manages an embedded Postgres and local file storage. For production, point it at your own Postgres and deploy however you like. Configure projects, agents, and goals — the agents take care of the rest. If you're a solo-entreprenuer you can use Tailscale to access Paperclip on the go. Then later you can deploy to e.g. Vercel when you need it. **Can I run multiple companies?** Yes. A single deployment can run an unlimited number of companies with complete data isolation. **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. **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) **Do agents run continuously?** By default, agents run on scheduled heartbeats and event-based triggers (task assignment, @-mentions). You can also hook in continuous agents like OpenClaw. You bring your agent and Paperclip coordinates.
## Development ```bash pnpm dev # Full dev (API + UI) pnpm dev:server # Server only pnpm build # Build all pnpm typecheck # Type checking pnpm test:run # Run tests pnpm db:generate # Generate DB migration pnpm db:migrate # Apply migrations ``` See [doc/DEVELOPING.md](doc/DEVELOPING.md) for the full development guide.
## Roadmap - ⚪ Get OpenClaw onboarding easier - ⚪ Get cloud agents working e.g. Cursor / e2b agents - ⚪ ClipMart - buy and sell entire agent companies - ⚪ Easy agent configurations / easier to understand - ⚪ Better support for harness engineering - ⚪ Plugin system (e.g. if you want to add a knowledgebase, custom tracing, queues, etc) - ⚪ Better docs
## Contributing We welcome contributions. See the [contributing guide](CONTRIBUTING.md) for details.
## Community - [Discord](https://discord.gg/m4HZY7xNG3) — Join the community - [GitHub Issues](https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip/issues) — bugs and feature requests - [GitHub Discussions](https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip/discussions) — ideas and RFC
## License MIT © 2026 Paperclip ## Star History [![Star History Chart](https://api.star-history.com/image?repos=paperclipai/paperclip&type=date&legend=top-left)](https://www.star-history.com/?repos=paperclipai%2Fpaperclip&type=date&legend=top-left)
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Open source under MIT. Built for people who want to run companies, not babysit agents.