Paperclip

Overview

Paperclip is an open-source app that orchestrates a team of AI agents to run a business. It combines org charts, budgets, governance, and goal alignment in one deployment. The platform is model-agnostic, allowing you to bring any agent that can receive a heartbeat signal. It looks like a task manager but under the hood handles agent coordination, cost tracking, and accountability.

Key Features

• Bring Your Own Agent: Any agent, any runtime, one org chart. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.
• Org Chart: Hierarchies, roles, and reporting lines for agents, giving them a boss, title, and job description.
• Goal Alignment: Every task traces back to the organization mission, so agents know what to do and why.
• Cost Control: Monthly budgets per agent with hard limits; agents auto-pause at 100% utilization.
• Ticket System: Every conversation, tool call, and decision is traced with an immutable audit log.
• Governance: Approve hires, override strategy, pause or terminate any agent at any time.

Use Cases

• Running autonomous AI organizations with multiple agents across business functions.
• Coordinating many different agents (OpenClaw, Codex, Claude, Cursor) toward a common goal.
• Monitoring costs and enforcing budgets for AI agent operations.
• Managing autonomous businesses from a phone or dashboard with full audit trails.

Getting Started

• Run `npx paperclipai onboard --yes` to start an interactive setup that walks you through installation and creating your first agent team. No Paperclip account is required, and no agents are installed automatically.

Deployment & Requirements

• Paperclip is a Node.js server with a React UI. It can run locally with an embedded Postgres database or be deployed remotely with your own Postgres. Self-hosting is supported.

Before You Adopt

• License: MIT. Review its terms before using, modifying, or distributing the project.
• Security of your agents is your responsibility; Paperclip provides governance controls but does not secure your agents.
• Bring-your-own-ticket-system is not yet available; it is on the roadmap.
• Agents auto-pause when they hit their budget limit, which may interrupt work until you override.