Steward

The Business Automation Factory

An AI agent that builds automations for your business, runs them on a schedule, and repairs them when they break — on a server you own.

Start here

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FrontAnalyticsInc/steward/main/install.sh | bash

v0.1.2. It builds every image from source on your own machine, so nothing here needs a credential beyond your model key. That build is most of the install time below.

  • 20–40 min to install
  • Your hardware
  • No account with us

Your mail and your keys never leave your machine.

  • There is no service to breach

    No account, no upload, no copy of anything held by anyone else.

  • Nothing faces the internet

    Reachable only on a private network you control.

  • Approvals, not autopilot

    Outgoing work waits for you. Leave it that way.

  • It holds your credentials

    Give it a server of its own, not your laptop.

  • It reads what strangers wrote

    Mail and pages can carry instructions meant for the agent.

  • A stuck job spends money

    Set a hard cap at your provider on day one.

Install

One command, on the box it will live on.

There is nothing to configure before you start. Run it on the machine Steward should live on and it does the rest — checks the box, installs Docker if that is missing, fetches the source, builds the images and starts the stack. It asks you for one thing. 

Steward installer

  ok  Ubuntu 24.04, 8 GB RAM, 61 GB free
  ok  docker and compose v2
  ok  installing to /srv/steward

Anthropic API key (blank to add later): _
01

A box you have

A VPS, a homelab, a Mac that stays awake. Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04, or macOS 13 and newer, with 8 GB of RAM and 40 GB free. Run the command on it and you are done.

02

Google Cloud

No box yet? The Terraform in infra/ builds one — an e2-standard-2, a 50 GB boot disk and a 40 GB data disk that survives the machine, in your own project. Your account, your bill, gone in one command when you say so.

03

AWS

The same configuration against the same variables, on a t3.large with the same two disks, in your own account. Billed by Amazon, never by us — and about 15% more than Google for it.

What it does

Just a few examples.

Standing jobs that run on their own and leave finished work waiting for you. These are a handful — you'll end up with your own.

Every one hands you a draft to approve. Nothing goes out as you unless you turn that on — and you shouldn't, in week one. It does the personal end too, once the business runs itself: your field, your reading, the people worth reconnecting with.

The factory

Nothing about it stays generic.

Those five examples are only where it starts. Every part of Steward bends to your business — what it watches, how it writes, what it builds next. Month three looks nothing like day one, and nothing like anyone else's.

Steward's automations screen: ten scheduled jobs listed with their status, where each one runs, its schedule and when it last ran.
Learns

It tunes itself to your judgement

Every draft you rewrite before approving is a correction it keeps — your voice, your standards, what you'd never send. Week four sounds like you.

Builds

It makes whatever you describe

Say what you want in a sentence and it builds the automation, schedules it, adds it to the line. No canvas, no integrations to wire, no waiting on us.

Repairs

It keeps itself running

Sites change, credentials lapse, jobs break. It notices, retries, fixes what it can — and tells you plainly what it can't, so nothing rots quietly.

Maintenance

Your automations don't rot.

Every tool on the market helps you build an automation. Almost none of them keep it alive. Pages get redesigned, credentials lapse, a model changes its mind about the format — and the thing you built six months ago has been quietly failing for five of them.

  1. Describe
  2. Build
  3. Schedule
  4. Run
  5. Monitor
  6. Repair
  7. Improve

↵ and back to Build, without you asking.

So they accumulate. Every automation it builds is another worker that never forgets how to do its job, and every week your business runs a little more of itself than it did the week before.

Who's inside

An office upstairs, a line downstairs.

Steward is not one model behind a chat box. It is two tiers with different jobs and different costs: a small office that holds the context and decides, and crews of narrow agents that do the repetitive work as cheaply as it can be done.

Tier one

The office

Purview over the whole system. It knows every job that exists, what each one costs, and what broke overnight — and it stands up a new crew when there is work that needs one.

  • Converses

    The one you talk to

    Your daily contact. Ask for something in a sentence, ask what happened to Tuesday's report, or change your mind about how a job should work. It is the only one you ever have to deal with.

  • Builds & heals

    The one that makes things work

    Turns a request into a running job. When one breaks, this is what reads the failure, rewrites the step, and puts it back on the schedule — usually before you knew it had stopped.

↓ work goes down to the line ↑ what the line can't finish comes back up

Tier two

The line

Crews of narrow agents, one workflow each, arranged like an assembly line. They hold no opinions about your business. They execute a defined job and hand back a result.

In sequence

Fetch Judge Send

Each step feeds the next.

In parallel

Source A Source B
Merge

Independent work runs at once.

In a loop

For each row

Repeat over a list, or until it's right.

  • They carry their own tools. Only the ones that job needs, and nothing wider.
  • They run on the cheapest model that clears the bar. Reaching for the expensive one is a decision, not a default, and most line work never needs it.
  • They escalate instead of guessing. Anything a crew can't finish goes back to the office with the failure attached.
  • They tune themselves. A step that fails often gets rewritten, and the cheaper path that works is the one it keeps.

You hire the office. The office staffs the line. What you pay for is the outcome, not the number of agents it took to get there.

An afternoon's build, and it's running.

Option one

Do it yourself

Free — open source, MIT licensed

The script checks the machine, installs everything, and prints a link to the console. Everything after that is a browser tab. No sales call, no trial, no account.

Start here Read it on GitHub

You pay your own cloud and model bills. Nothing comes to us.

Option two

We do it with you

Talk to us about scope

A screen-share from empty server to working automations, the fiddly Google and mail configuration done properly, and jobs built around how your business actually runs. Then someone to call.

Get in touch

Minimum you need for it to work

  • An Anthropic API key — Steward does nothing that calls a model until you give it one, and it never leaves your machine.
  • Around $60 a month — for the server and its disks, if you have to rent one. About $50 is the machine and $10 is the 90 GB under it: 50 GB of boot for Docker's images, and 40 GB of its own for everything Steward learns, which is the disk you keep when you resize the machine. AWS runs nearer $70 for the same shape. Nothing if you already have a machine. Model usage sits on top of that, capped wherever you set it.
  • A machine that stays awake — Steward runs on a schedule, so a laptop that sleeps will miss it.
  • No terminal after this — the script prints a link, and everything from there is a page in your browser.

Where it sits

You

A browser tab on your own network

Steward, on your server

Your keys and your mail live here, and nowhere else.

  • Email
  • Calendar
  • CRM
  • Files
  • GitHub
  • The web
  • Your cloud
  • Model API

It reaches these with your credentials. Nothing routes through a third party unless you tell it to — including us.