Your own business suite

The Business Suite is a set of apps for a small business that runs on your own server: team chat, tasks and projects, customers, leads from your website, docs and procedures, and an AI assistant with a memory of how your business works. It is open source under the MIT licence, so the code, the server and the data are yours. The whole picture is on Your own apps.

What is in it

• Announcements: news for the whole team, pinned posts, and who has read each one. Owner's guide
• Team chat: channels, direct messages, threads, files. Owner's guide
• Tasks and projects: a list, a board and a calendar for each project. Owner's guide
• Customers: contacts, companies, deals in a pipeline and follow-ups. Owner's guide
• Leads: forms for your website, a list of everyone who asked with how fast someone got back to them, follow-up emails that wait for your approval, and a report of where your customers come from. It comes with release 0.1.1. Owner's guide, and ours: Capturing leads from your website
• Docs: the team wiki and procedures, with every earlier version kept. Owner's guide
• The assistant: ask in plain words. It looks things up straight away. Anything it wants to change waits in Approvals until a person approves it. Owner's guide

Each owner's guide is in the suite's code on GitHub and says what the app does and who can do what in it.

It replaces tools only your team uses. It connects to, and never replaces, accounting, payments, payroll, banking and email delivery, and it never holds regulated records such as health, legal or tax files.

How you get it

Your intern sets it up; you own it and approve each step. Start by posting a project that says you want your own apps.

1. You rent the server in your business's name, with your own card. Your intern tells you the size. See Choosing a server for your business suite.
2. You choose the setup code, a code of at least 8 characters that only you know. Your intern never needs your passwords.
3. Your intern installs it from the suite's standard setup file (from the latest release), with you on a call or as a member of your provider account, and checks every app works. It takes about ten minutes.
4. You create the owner account with your setup code and decide who joins. Then your intern moves your team in, one app at a time, as you approve.

Because it is a standard open-source install, any developer can repeat it: you are never locked in to us.

Who looks after it

You own it, and you pay your provider for the server and, if you use one, your AI provider for the assistant. We do not run it and we see none of its data.

Your intern looks after it. During the internship they set it up, change the apps and teach you the one command that shows its status. After the internship you can keep them on a monthly retainer through us for updates, backups and the next app: see Keeping your intern on a retainer.

The suite backs itself up every night, but those backups stay on the same server: if the server is lost, they are lost with it. Have your intern turn on the off-site copy to a storage bucket you rent (the first item below), install updates when your intern tells you, and keep your setup code, passwords and the suite's encryption key somewhere safe that is not the server.

First day with your intern

Do these together on the day the suite is installed. Each takes a few minutes.

1. An off-site backup. Rent a storage bucket in your business's name (any S3-compatible storage) and have your intern point the nightly backup at it. Check the next day that Settings, then Business, shows last night's backup.
2. Email. Enter your email provider's SMTP details in Settings, then Email, and send the test email, so invites and password resets arrive.
3. The AI key. Enter your AI provider's key in Settings, then AI, and press "Send a test message".
4. Your provider's snapshots or backups. Turn them on at your server provider if it offers them: a second copy of the whole server.
5. A monthly date for updates. Once a month: the server's own updates and any new suite release. Put it in your calendar, with the name of the person who will do it.
6. Write down the encryption key. Your intern shows it with sudo business-suite secret-key show. It is in no backup, and moving the suite to a new server without it means entering the AI key and email password again. Keep it with your setup code and passwords, not on the server.

When your intern's placement ends

The suite keeps working when the internship ends; what changes is who can get in. On the last day:

1. Switch off their suite account in People. That signs them out everywhere at once. Their messages, tasks and pages stay.
2. Remove their SSH key from the server, and remove them from your provider's team if you invited them there.
3. Revoke their coding agent's tokens in Assistant settings, under Coding agents, if they used the business brain.
4. Decide who applies updates. Someone has to run the monthly server and suite updates. Keep your intern on a retainer for that (see Keeping your intern on a retainer), or have them show you, before they go, how to run the server's updates and business-suite update. If nobody runs them, the suite keeps running but stops getting fixes.

What it costs each month

We charge nothing for the suite itself. You pay:

• The server, to the provider you choose. The sizes, and the prices we found on a dated check, are in Choosing a server for your business suite. Provider snapshots or backups, if you turn them on, are billed there too.
• Your AI provider, for the assistant, by use. Assistant settings shows this month's use and lets you set a monthly spend limit. With no AI key, the assistant is off and costs nothing.
• A storage bucket, optional but strongly advised, for the off-site backup copy (and for files, if you keep them there). Your storage provider bills it by how much you keep.
• A domain, optional, from your domain registrar. Without one the suite answers at an address made from the server's IP.
• A retainer, optional, if you keep your intern on for updates and the next app: see Keeping your intern on a retainer.

It is a first version

The current release is 0.1.1. It has been installed from start to finish, with all its apps, on a practice server with 2 GB of memory. A few parts have not yet been checked on a real public server: the trusted HTTPS certificate, a live AI key, notifications on a phone, sending email through a real provider, and off-site backups. Ask your intern to test each one with you on the first day.