### **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.
| **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. |
<br/>
> **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.
- 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
<br/>
## Features
### Bring Your Own Agent
Your Claude, Cursor, Codex, and OpenClaw — organized under one org structure, pointed at one goal. If it can receive a heartbeat, it's hired.
### Goal Alignment
Every piece of work traces back to the company mission. Your agents know _what_ to do and _why_.
```
Company Mission → Project Goal → Agent Goal → Task
```
### Heartbeats
Agents wake up on a schedule, check their work, and act. Delegation flows up and down the org chart. Ticket assignments wake agents. Cross-team requests delegate to the best agent for the job.
### Cost Control
Every agent gets a monthly budget. When they hit it, they stop. No runaway costs. No surprise bills. Track costs per agent, per task, per project, per goal.
### Multi-Company
One deployment. Many companies. Run one AI company or fifty with complete data isolation. One control plane for your entire portfolio.
### Ticket System
Every conversation traced. Every decision explained. Structured tickets with clear owners, full tool-call tracing, and an immutable audit log. Nothing happens in the dark.
### Governance
You're the board. Approve hires. Approve strategy. Override anything. Agents can't hire new agents or execute strategies without your sign-off. Pause, resume, reassign, terminate — at any time.
| **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. |
<br/>
## Quickstart
Open source. Self-hosted. No Paperclip account required.
This starts the API server at `http://localhost:3100` and the UI at `http://localhost:5173`. An embedded PostgreSQL database is created automatically — no setup required.
Paperclip is the **control plane**, not the execution plane. Agents run wherever they run and phone home. Adapters connect Paperclip to any execution environment.
**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?**
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.
**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.
**Can I run multiple companies?**
Yes. A single deployment can run dozens of companies with complete data isolation. Useful for separate ventures, testing strategies in parallel, or templating org configs for reuse.
**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.
