Solutions

Twelve kinds of team, twelve different arguments

The case for Polaris is not the same case twice. Pick the team you actually run.

The short answer

Polaris fits teams that keep work in a tracker, notes in a doc tool and conversation in chat, and pay for all three by the seat. The workspace is free with no seat count. AI workers are hired in about sixty seconds, run on cloud machines, and bill roughly two dollars per human-hour of work they deliver. Nothing delivered, nothing billed.

Audience pages: 12
Software cost: $0, no seats
Billing unit: ~$2 per human-hour delivered
Status: Free public beta

Why these pages are not one page repeated

An agency and a nonprofit both save money on seats. That is where the similarity ends. An agency cares because the gap between its bill rate and its delivery cost is the entire business. A nonprofit cares because per-seat pricing charges it for forty volunteers who log in twice a quarter. Same fact, two completely different arguments, and a page that makes the generic version of both persuades neither.

So each page below picks the one thing that is most true for that kind of team, and argues that. Some of them argue that Polaris is a poor first move right now. Those pages are not softer than the others. They are the ones worth reading.

The four arguments underneath the twelve pages

Every page is a version of one of these, sharpened for a particular week of work.

Cost that only exists when work exists
Per-seat software bills for a place to put work, whether or not anyone puts anything there. Polaris bills for work that came back finished. Startups, nonprofits and small businesses feel this hardest because their headcount is lumpy or their budget is a grant line.
An hourly cost line you can audit
Human-equivalent hours are estimated by an open formula from observable effort and logged job by job. Agencies and consultancies live and die on the arithmetic between what an hour costs them and what they charge for it.
Work that continues after the laptop closes
A real cloud machine wakes per task. That matters most to distributed teams, where the useful hours are the ones when the other half of the team is asleep, and to founders who already run agents locally and lose them at midnight.
One workspace instead of a tab per tool
Tasks, docs and team chat in one product, with humans and AI workers in the same members table and the same assignment flow. Product, design and software teams notice this as the end of copying the same decision into three places.

Every audience page

Twelve teams, twelve arguments, each with the workers that team hires first and the honest note on fit.

Polaris for startups

Your next hire takes about sixty seconds and costs nothing in the weeks it has nothing to do.

Polaris for agencies

You already know what an hour of delivery sells for. This is a page about what it costs.

Polaris for solo founders

Being the whole org chart is not a time problem. It is an accountability problem.

Polaris for remote teams

The problem was never the meetings. It is what happens to a decision made while half the team is asleep.

Polaris for software teams

Nobody joined your team to write the release notes. Something still has to write them.

Polaris for consultancies

The scarce resource in a consultancy is not hours. It is partner attention, spent on work a partner should not be doing.

Polaris for ecommerce brands

You staff for peak and pay for it in February, or you staff for February and suffer in November.

Polaris for nonprofits

Your org chart is six staff and forty people who help. Per-seat pricing was designed for the opposite shape.

Polaris for product teams

Look at a product manager's calendar and subtract the meetings. What is left is mostly reformatting.

Polaris for small business

The jobs that never get done in a small business are not hard. There is simply nobody free to do them.

Polaris for design studios

Nobody has ever put a line item for asset renaming on an invoice, and every studio pays for it anyway.

Polaris for technical founders

The agent that wrote half your week's work is single-player, local, and gone at midnight.

The pages behind the arguments

Cost maths, the worker roster, and what a cloud agent actually does once you assign it something.

What your work stack actually costs

Sixteen pages of pricing arithmetic you can check yourself, with the billing basis named on every row.

Per-seat pricing and usage pricing charge for different things

One model prices access. The other prices output. Almost every argument about software cost is really about which of those you are buying.

What an AI worker costs, and how the hours are counted

The whole formula is on this page, including the parts that make it an estimate rather than a measurement.

AI workers you can hire, brief and assign

Every role below is a teammate you hire in chat, brief with an editable skill file, and assign work to on the same board as your people.

Cloud agents that keep working after you close the laptop

For the person whose agent is brilliant, local, single-player, and dead the moment the lid goes down.

What an AI worker actually does, department by department

Twelve functions, sixty recurring jobs, and the exact tool connection each one needs.

Questions people ask

+Which of these twelve pages should I read if my team is a mix?

Read the one that describes how you get paid, not the one that describes what you build. A four-person studio that also resells hours has more in common with the agencies page than with the design studios page. The commercial shape of the team predicts the argument better than the craft does.

+Does Polaris cost more for a bigger team?

No. The workspace is free with no seat count and no tier, so unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams and docs cost nothing at any headcount. The only bill is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour that an AI worker delivers, which tracks the work you asked for rather than the number of people who can log in.

+Is there a kind of team Polaris is clearly wrong for today?

Yes, several. Organisations with a signed data processing agreement that forbids third-party handling of client or donor records should keep that data out until their own legal review is done. Teams in the middle of a peak trading season should not be moving their operating system that week. Both cases are covered in detail on the relevant pages.

+Do we have to leave Slack, Notion or Linear to use Polaris?

No. Slack, Notion, Linear, GitHub, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Figma, HubSpot, Stripe, Supabase, WhatsApp and Instagram are all in the connection catalog, so a worker can be given access to the tools you already run. Plenty of teams will connect rather than migrate, at least at first.

+What is the first thing to actually do?

Sign in with an emailed code, tell the Chief of Staff what keeps slipping, and let it run the hiring interview. That produces a worker with a readable skill file in about a minute. Assign it one real task from this week and judge the delivery, because the delivery is the product.