For startups

Polaris for startups

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

The short answer

Polaris gives a startup output without payroll. The workspace is free for unlimited people, so tasks, docs and team chat cost nothing at any headcount. AI workers are hired in chat in about sixty seconds, get an editable skill file, and bill roughly two dollars per human-hour they deliver. Nothing delivered, nothing billed, which keeps the cost variable while runway is the binding constraint.

Software cost: $0 at any headcount
Time to hire a worker: ~60 seconds
Cost of an idle worker: $0
Billing unit: ~$2 per human-hour delivered

The arithmetic that breaks first

A startup does not fail because it lacks a project management tool. It fails because the list of things that must happen this quarter is four times longer than the number of people available to do them, and both available answers are slow. Raising takes months. Hiring takes weeks to source, weeks to close, weeks to become useful, and the cost starts on day one regardless.

In the meantime the company is paying per seat for three or four products that hold work rather than do it. A tracker, a doc tool, a chat app, and by now a stack of individual AI subscriptions on personal cards that nobody can see or assign anything to. That is fixed cost buying storage, at exactly the stage where every fixed cost should be a variable one.

What the cost line looks like instead

Three numbers, all of them checkable inside the product.

Workspace, forever

Unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams and docs. No seat count, no tier.

~60s

To hire an AI worker

A short interview in chat, then a worker card with a readable SKILL.md.

~$2

Per human-hour delivered

Estimated by an open formula, logged job by job, challengeable line by line.

The first three workers most startups need

Not the ones that sound impressive. The ones covering the work a two-person founding team keeps postponing.

Research analyst
The competitor teardown, the market sizing, the pricing scan that keeps getting pushed to next week because it takes a full day and nobody has one. It runs a live tool loop with real web search and delivers the finding as a comment with the file attached.
Content writer
Landing copy, the changelog nobody has written since March, the launch post, the docs page a customer asked for twice. Give it the skill file that carries your voice rules and it stops being a rewrite job.
SDR
First-touch outbound before you can justify a sales hire. Account research, list building and drafting, with a human closing every task, because agents deliver and people decide what actually gets sent.

Two ways to add capacity in month four

Hire a person

Weeks of sourcing before a first conversation
Salary starts on day one and does not pause in a slow month
Onboarding lives in someone's head and leaves when they do
Wrong hire is expensive to unwind and hard to talk about

Hire an AI worker

A short interview in chat, every answer a click, roughly a minute
Costs nothing in a week where you assign it nothing
Its instructions are a SKILL.md file you can read, edit and reuse
Wrong brief is a file edit, not a conversation with a lawyer

Next, for a startup

The cost maths at five people, the workers above, and what a delivered task actually looks like.

Tool stack cost for a 5-person team

Three subscriptions, five people, and the arithmetic laid out so you can check it against your own invoices.

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.

Hire an AI research analyst

Assign the question on Tuesday afternoon and read the brief before your Wednesday call, with every claim carrying the URL it came from.

Hire an AI content writer

Briefs go in as tasks, drafts come back as versioned docs you can comment on line by line, and your voice rules live in a file rather than in one person's head.

Assigning a task to an AI worker

There is no prompt box. The task is the prompt, and the checklist is the contract.

Questions people ask

+We are three people. Is Polaris overkill?

The workspace costs nothing at three people, so the question is not price, it is whether you need a tracker, docs and team chat in one place yet. If your work currently lives in a shared note and one Slack channel, the honest reason to start is the AI workers, not the project management. Hire one worker, assign it something real, and let the workspace fill up around it.

+How do we know the hours on the bill are not inflated?

Human-equivalent hours are estimated by an open formula from observable effort: base pickup time, searches at roughly twelve minutes each, finished prose at about ninety characters per minute, plus fixed overheads for checklist items, comments addressed and files produced, clamped between five minutes and eight hours per session. Every job is logged on the worker's work log, and you can challenge any line from the log itself.

+What happens to our bill in a quiet month?

It goes to zero. The software is free with no seats, and billing only starts when an AI worker delivers something. A month where you assign nothing costs nothing, which is the opposite of how a per-seat stack behaves when a founder goes heads-down on product.

+Does this replace a first marketing or ops hire?

It changes when you need one, not whether. A worker will produce the research, the drafts and the recurring reporting, but a human still owns the judgement, closes the task and rates the work. Treat it as buying back the hours that were going to be a contractor invoice, and hire the person when the judgement load, not the production load, is the thing overwhelming you.

+Can our whole team use it if only one of us is technical?

Yes. Sign-in is passwordless, an emailed code with no password path anywhere in the product, and hiring a worker is a chat interview where every answer is a click. Nobody opens a terminal. The technical founder will care about the runtime and the skill files; everyone else will only ever see tasks, docs and chat.

Polaris for solo founders

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

Polaris for technical founders

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