Has AEQI stopped being for people starting a company?

No. Founding is still one of the three doors, and it is the one AEQI was built through — this company runs on its own product. What changed is that it is no longer the only sentence on the front page. The promise is now about running a Company, which is equally true whether the Company is three days old or thirty years old.

Three groups, and the product opens with a door for each. One person who wants their own work to run without them holding every thread. A founding team building something new that needs functions filled before it can afford to fill them with people. And an established company that already has customers, revenue, and operations, and wants agents inside those operations rather than a chat window beside them.

Why does the pricing ladder have three rungs?

Because there are three groups and each needs a different amount of company, not a different product. Personal is €50 a month: one seat, 1,250 credits. Startup is €200: four seats, 5,000 credits. Business is €800: sixteen seats, 20,000 credits. Every rung is a real hosted Company with the same capabilities; the rungs differ by seats, monthly credits, and runtime size. The door you come in through sets the default, and never locks the choice.

One cent of execution on infrastructure provisioned for your Company. It covers the work your agents actually do — model calls, tool use, the runtime that keeps them going — on a machine that carries your database, your files, your website, and your integrations. It is a meter of work performed, not of people added, which is why the ladder still makes sense for a company that grows output while headcount stays flat.

From starting a company to running one

For most of its life, the first sentence on this site was about founding: start a company that runs itself. It was a true sentence and a good one, and it had a ceiling we could see from the beginning. It addressed the moment before a company exists — a moment most of our buyers had already passed years ago.

The sentence is now “Make your Company run itself.” That is a small edit and a large change of position, and it is worth explaining rather than quietly shipping.

What the pilots taught us

The companies that came to us were not pre-formation. They were law firms with more instructions than associates. Agencies whose founder was the bottleneck on every deliverable. Mid-sized operators with a compliance officer, a real ledger, and a backlog of work nobody had time to do. Not one of them wanted to start anything. They wanted the thing they already had to stop depending on them for every step.

Founding remained the door we knew best — AEQI is built and run by agents inside its own product, and that is still the sharpest proof we have. But the proof was being used to argue for the wrong moment. A company that already exists does not need a founding ceremony. It needs staffing.

The three groups

So the product opens with three doors rather than one, and the rule we hold ourselves to is that every word on the front page must be equally true for all three.

One person, running their own work. A freelancer, a consultant, a solo operator. The unit of the problem is not a company in the legal sense — it is everything that only happens because they personally do it. One agent, one seat, and a place for the operating context to live outside their head. The measure of success is whether a week away costs anything.

A founding team, building something new. Two or three people who need marketing, support, finance, and engineering to exist before they can afford to hire any of them. This is the case AEQI was born in: the roles get filled by agents, the work gets decomposed into quests, the website is live from the first week, and the operating history starts compounding before there is a company to compound it in.

An established company, adding capacity. Customers, revenue, staff, processes that work. What they want is not a new company but agents inside the one they have: sitting in named roles, holding real permissions, doing work that shows up in a ledger their people can read. The demand is not replace my team. It is give my team a team.

The same thing, three sizes

The temptation with three audiences is to build three products. We deliberately did not. Every door leads to the same object — a hosted Company with agents in roles, a quest ledger, compounding memory, a live website, and its own server. What differs is how much of it you need on day one.

That is exactly what the ladder is. Personal, €50 a month: one seat, 1,250 credits, free for the first three days. Startup, €200: four seats, 5,000 credits. Business, €800: sixteen seats, 20,000 credits. Extra credits at €20 per 1,000 whenever a month runs hot. Above the ladder, Enterprise stays a conversation rather than a card.

The door you enter through sets the default rung and never locks it. A three-person firm that has been trading for a decade is right to buy the €200 size, and forcing it upward would be a way of losing a customer while congratulating ourselves on positioning. Seats, credits, and runtime size are the only things that move between rungs. Capability does not.

What a credit is a credit of

A credit is one cent of execution on infrastructure provisioned for your Company alone. It pays for the work the agents do and the machine that carries your database, your files, your site, and your integrations — a machine that exists whether or not you use it that week.

We are specific about this because the market is full of credits that mean something else. Several good products meter model tokens passed through at cost, which makes their credit numerically enormous and structurally different from ours. If you are comparing pages, compare the deliverable: a metered conversation, or a company that keeps running when you close the tab.

It also explains why the meter counts work rather than seats. Per-seat pricing is a bet that headcount keeps rising, and a vendor on that meter cannot honestly recommend doing more with fewer people. We would rather charge for output and let you decide how many humans stand next to it.

What has not changed

The thesis is the same one we started with: a company is an operating system, and the parts of it that were held together by people remembering things can be compiled. Agents give it motion; roles give it authority; memory gives it continuity; the ledger makes all three legible. None of that was invented for the new sentence.

What changed is the moment we address. Not the day you decide to start a company — every day after it, when the thing you built still needs running.