Bo[a]B is an operations layer that runs on a small computer in your office. The other tools draft the document; Bo[a]B runs the process — the intake, the follow-up, the hours that get worked but never billed. Your hardware, your data, your call.
Where this is real today →Time leaks before it ever reaches an invoice. A call that ran forty minutes and got logged as fifteen. A document reviewed on a Sunday that nobody wrote down. Bo[a]B reads the work your people are already doing, finds the hours that never reached a bill, and asks you before it does anything about them.
Why it is only ever a proposal. Bo[a]B never edits a timesheet. It shows you the evidence it found, tells you which matter it belongs to, and waits. You approve it or you throw it out. A system that quietly adds hours to a client's bill is a liability, not a feature.
Each function learns your patterns and reports in plain English. You stay the decision-maker. Bob handles the part where the decision gets executed and the records get kept straight.
Each one carries its real status. Runs today means it works on the bench unit now. In build means it is being written. Planned means it is designed and not yet started.
Keeps the books current and tells you what changed.
Reconciles your accounts every morning and drafts the monthly close. Tells you the three numbers that moved most week-over-week — and flags the cash-flow dip three weeks before it happens.
The 13-week cash-flow and runway report already builds and opens on the box with no network at all. The accounting connector that feeds it automatically is still being written.
Tracks every lead and follows up so none of them rot.
Catches every inbound — form fills, walk-ins, referrals — and puts them in one place. Drafts the follow-up in your voice and flags the leads gone quiet. Turns a shoebox of business cards into a working pipeline.
The two-way link to your practice-management system, and the time-capture loop that rides on it, is the centre of the product and is what I am building now.
Writes, schedules, and reports on what's working.
Drafts the posts, the newsletter, the seasonal promo — in your voice, not generic AI sludge. Schedules across channels and reports back in plain English on what worked and what didn't.
Designed, scoped, and not yet started. It comes after the time-capture loop.
Answers the easy ones, routes the hard ones to you.
Watches the inbox, the chat, the voicemail. Answers the questions you've answered a thousand times — hours, location, walk-ins — and routes the ones that need you, context attached, so you respond fast.
The phone-system connector is in build. Reading and sorting what arrives already works.
Watches the numbers and flags what's moving.
Reads your finances, sales, marketing, and operations together and tells you weekly what changed. Surfaces the patterns you'd miss — the regular who's vanished, the item with quietly collapsing margins. The thing your CFO would tell you if you had one.
This one needs the other five feeding it before it can be honest, so it is deliberately last.
Keeps the tools talking to each other and alerts you when one stops.
Your POS talks to your accounting; your invoices land in your books without anyone copying numbers. When something breaks — and it always does — you get a clear alert and a fix path, not 3am detective work.
The plumbing is the part that runs: reading and sorting documents, stripping identifying details before anything leaves, answering questions on-box, and keeping a tamper-evident record you can export yourself.
An honest conversation about what your operating week actually looks like. Where the hours go. What data lives where. Which three time-sinks would change everything if they disappeared. I leave with the picture; you leave with a clear scope and a fixed price.
I set up Bo[a]B against your data, in your voice, on your hardware. Each of the six functions gets tuned to what your business actually needs — a coffee shop's Bob doesn't look like a law firm's. You're available for a couple of working sessions while we get it right.
The machine — a small computer about the size of a hardback book — gets delivered and installed where it lives. We turn it on together. We watch it work. I walk you through what you can ask Bob to do, and what you should never ask him to do.
You're the operator from day one — Bob reports to you, not to me. I'm in the background keeping the system healthy, fixing what breaks, and pushing out improvements as I learn from other customers. Weekly check-ins for the first month, then monthly once it's humming. The line stays open.
Most AI services run in the cloud, on hardware you don't own, with your data flowing through systems you don't control. That model works for some businesses. It doesn't work for the businesses I build for — the ones whose customer list, books, supplier relationships, and competitive edge live in the data Bob touches.
Bo[a]B runs on a small computer that sits in your shop. Your customer records, your books, your patterns, your way of doing business are processed right there, on hardware you can put your hand on. The guiding rule is simple: your data stays under your control — what, if anything, ever leaves the box is your decision.
Three practical consequences: your data isn't used to train anyone else's model; the everyday work keeps running on the box even if your internet drops; and if you ever decide to stop working with me, you keep the box and the data with it. Walking away is a clean break, not a forensics project.
What that means in practice, today. Identifying details are replaced with codes before anything is allowed to leave the box. Questions about a document you hand it are answered by the processor inside the box, with nothing leaving at all. Every action is written to a record you can read and export yourself. Those three run on the bench unit now — the signing keys that make that record tamper-evident are a stand-in until the real ones land.
Anyone can tell you that you own your data. The honest test is what happens when you switch something off — so here is that answer in advance, for every part of it. I would rather you check this now than find out later.
The box keeps running and keeps doing everything it already knows how to do. What you stop getting is the upkeep as the software around you changes, so connections drift out of date over months — not minutes. It degrades. It never bricks.
It is in your name — your choice of Anthropic, OpenAI or Google — so the cap is yours to set and the bill is yours to read. Turn it off and the heavier tasks stop and say so, while the everyday work carries on inside the box. You will never get a wrong answer because a bill went unpaid; it declines rather than guesses.
You grant it in your own workspace settings, the same way you would for anyone who works for you, and you withdraw it from the same screen without telling me first. Bo[a]B stops reading those folders and says so, rather than quietly working from a stale copy.
I keep one device on your network so I can maintain the box. What it is allowed to do is set by rules you control, and you can remove it in a few clicks. I will walk you through doing exactly that during setup — I would rather you practise it once while I am standing there.
You keep the box, the data on it, every account it runs on, and a sealed card that gets you back into all of it without me. No export request, no handover project, no final invoice for your own information. A clean break is the design, not a concession.
The hardware is yours on the same terms — I buy it in your name, at what it costs, never with a markup on top.
You own Bo[a]B outright — buy it, or lease-to-own. On top sits one flat keep-current subscription: think of it as integration insurance. It keeps the connectors working as the software around you changes, so nothing quietly breaks. Cancel anytime and the box keeps running — it degrades gracefully, it never bricks. Sized to your firm by the number of billing professionals, and priced against the billable hours you're losing today — not against a software seat.
For the solo practice and the small firm.
A small computer I source, build and bring to you working — yours outright, billed at exactly what it cost me. I don't fit Bo[a]B to a machine you already have; the box is part of the product, not a requirement you go shopping for. Start with the function that hurts most and add the rest as you go. Heavier thinking goes out to an AI account in your name, pay-as-you-go, only when you ask for it.
Own from $6K · keep-current $500/mo
The full operations layer — and the default.
A dedicated box you own, sized so more of the everyday thinking happens on it rather than going out. Covers the core of the practice — intake, follow-up, billing, reporting. When in doubt, this is the tier.
Own from $15K · keep-current $1.2K/mo
For the firm running on real volume.
A dedicated box you own, sized for the heaviest local work, and the full suite of functions. Built for firms with serious archives and serious throughput — years of matters, projects, and records.
Own from $30K · keep-current $2K/mo
Hardware is billed at cost — a pass-through, never a markup. Outgrow your tier and it's a swap and a restore, not a migration.
Bo[a]B is at the founding-customer stage. There is one unit, it sits on a bench, and it is not installed anywhere. The first install will be a beta, run by the person who built it. Everything above describes a system being built in the open — not a recording of a live one.
Why say so on the site itself? Because you are going to ask, and because the answer is easier to check than to dress up. What follows is what runs on that bench unit today, and what does not.
The designs are real designs and the behaviour is real behaviour — approvals really route, the boundary really refuses things, the report really recomputes on the device. The firm, the clients and the numbers in any demo you see are invented. Where something is still in build, it says so, on the page and on the screen. If a claim here starts outrunning what the box does, that is a bug of the same severity as a crash.
pi.0 is a studio of one. I do the work, end to end — discovery, build, install, the running of it. I don't subcontract. Twenty years before this, I ran operations inside companies that had real ops teams — Google, NYT, MoMA, a turnaround at Sonicbids. Bo[a]B is the layer those companies have, sized for the businesses I grew up around.
Owner-led professional-services firms — law practices, consultancies, agencies — roughly 3 to 50 billing professionals, where time is the product and it leaks: hours worked but never captured, work delivered but never billed. The kind of firm where a partner still knows every client and is also the one chasing the follow-up at 11pm. It's not built for firms big enough to staff a real ops team, for solos a spreadsheet still covers, or for owners who want a fully autonomous agent they don't supervise. Bo[a]B takes the busywork off your plate; it never takes you out of the loop.
Not yet as a finished product. There is one unit on a bench and no installs anywhere — the honest picture is in where this is real today. What I am looking for now is the first beta firm, which means you get the founding-customer terms and I get a real practice to build the time-capture loop against. If that sounds like a trade you want, that is exactly the conversation to have.
You own Bo[a]B, then keep it current with one flat subscription (see owning Bo[a]B). Core — up to 10 billing pros — is own-from $6K plus $500/month. Practice (10–30 pros, the default) is own-from $15K plus $1.2K/month. Firm (30–50 pros) is own-from $30K plus $2K/month. Buy outright or lease-to-own; the subscription is cancel-anytime, and if you stop it the box keeps running. The hardware is billed at cost — never a markup. No multi-year lock-in.
No. I supply the box — you own it, at what it cost me, but you don't bring your own and I don't install onto existing hardware. Bo[a]B is tuned to the machine it ships on, and the promises on this page — that it keeps working with the internet down, that it comes back from a cold start, that a failure is an overnight swap — are only ones I can make about a box I built and can replace. Supporting whatever is already under your desk would mean withdrawing most of them.
You do. Always. Your data lives on your hardware, in your shop, and ownership never transfers to me. It's processed on the box, and you control what — if anything — ever leaves it. I never sell your data, and I never use it to train a model for anyone else.
You keep the machine. You keep the data. We schedule one final session where I show you what's still running, what you can keep using as-is, and what you'd want to swap out if you decide to maintain it long-term yourself. No exit fees. No lock-in.
The box is standard hardware I supply and keep spares for. If something fails, a replacement gets shipped overnight under warranty. Your configuration is backed up nightly, encrypted, and held off-site, so a replacement gets rebuilt from that backup rather than from scratch. I'm not going to quote you a restore time — I haven't yet rehearsed a full rebuild end to end, and I'd rather say so than give you a number I can't stand behind. What I will say is that you'd lose automated work, not your business: the humans still know how to do their jobs. The same machinery works in reverse — if you outgrow your box, we swap the hardware and restore. Your system doesn't change, your data never leaves your control.
Every run Bob makes is recorded — what he did, when, and which rule allowed it. Being straight with you about where that stands: today those records are machine-readable, and I go through them with you. The browsable plain-English version you'd read on your own is being built and isn't finished. Separately, and this part is in place today: anything Bob writes — emails, posts, reports — passes through your approval before it goes out, unless you explicitly tell him to ship it without checking.
No. Bob does the work nobody on your team wants to do — the reconciliation, the follow-up nobody got to, the report that should have been written but wasn't. Your team stays on the work they're good at, the work customers actually pay you for.
Read access to the data you choose: email, POS, accounting software, calendar, payroll. Write access only where you explicitly grant it — sending follow-up emails, posting to social, drafting your weekly report. Anything that moves money or commits the business needs your approval every time.
About three to four weeks from signing to the day it's running on your own numbers — and you spend roughly two hours of that. One call sets up your accounts, and I order the hardware. It ships to me, I build it and test it on your network, and I bring it to you already working; the install itself is under an hour. Then a couple of weeks of settling in while you and Bob get used to each other. The part that varies is the paperwork at the front — everything after it is predictable.
Tell me. If it fits within Bob's shape — automating a piece of operating work — it gets built. Improvements land for everyone, not just you, with your data staying yours. If what you want is bigger than that — a custom product, a one-off integration — we scope it separately.
You own Bo[a]B — the monthly isn't a lease on it. It's a keep-current subscription: integration insurance that keeps your connectors working as the software around you changes, plus system updates, the new functions other firms have unlocked, and direct access to me when something needs attention. Cancel it and the box keeps running on what it already knows — it degrades gracefully, it never bricks. You're paying to keep it current, not to keep it.
Two reasons. First, it stands for Business on a Box — the literal thing it is, a small computer running your business in the background. Second, it sounds like Bob, a nod to Bob from Office Space — the efficiency consultant who told the truth and cut the bullshit. The Office Space Bob fired people. This Bob does the opposite: he handles the work your team doesn't want to do, so you can keep them on what they're good at.
If you've read this far and any of it sounded like your business, talk to me. Twenty minutes, no slides, no pitch — just a conversation about whether Bo[a]B fits your shape.