Paperclip

What is Paperclip?

Paperclip is an open-source orchestration platform for building autonomous companies out of AI agents. Rather than wrangling individual AI tools or chat sessions, Paperclip structures multiple agents into a hierarchy with defined roles, goals and budgets. The platform handles task coordination, cost control, governance and cross-agent delegation. You act as the board of directors: you approve agent hires, review strategy and retain full control over execution.

The core problem: the orchestration gap

Anyone running several AI agents productively today quickly loses oversight. Individual Claude, Cursor or Codex sessions run in isolation. Budgets balloon, results aren't reproducible and there's no audit trail. Paperclip closes exactly that gap: an organisational layer that manages agents like employees — with an org chart, goals, tickets and approvals.

Core features

• Org chart: hierarchies and reporting lines for agent teams
• Goal alignment: company mission → projects → tasks
• Heartbeat scheduling: agents wake on a schedule or on ticket assignment
• Per-agent budgets: monthly caps with automatic throttling
• Multi-company: fully isolated data silos per company
• Ticket system: tasks with a complete audit log
• Governance: approval gates and override capability
• Bring-your-own-agent: Claude, OpenClaw, Codex, Cursor, HTTP, Bash
• Mobile-ready dashboard
• Persistent agent state across sessions
• Cost tracking per agent, task and project

Where it fits

• Autonomous business operators running multiple AI ventures
• Dev and content-marketing agencies
• Crypto trading desks
• E-commerce operations
• Lead generation in real estate
• YouTube content production
• Teams running several AI-driven ventures in parallel

Pricing

Paperclip is free and open source under an MIT licence. Fully self-hosted — no Paperclip account required. A single command gets you started: npx paperclipai onboard --yes. The only ongoing costs are the API usage of the connected agent models.

The verdict for B2B operators

For teams serious about agentic engineering and running more than one or two agents, Paperclip is an overdue layer. The premise — agents as employees in a company with a budget and a goal — is clearly thought through and mirrors the logic you already know from building real teams. Anyone taking autonomous GTM seriously at an operational level, rather than just looking for a chat window, should at least evaluate Paperclip.

Numman Ali: “Built with great taste — design and UX quality like Linear.”

Resolver Vicky: “OpenClaw is the employee, Paperclip is the company.”

Evan Drake: “The rise of autonomous companies is inevitable.”