Macro (macro-inc/macro) is a fully open-source work platform that bundles email, team chat, docs, tasks, calls, a CRM and AI agents into a single application. It is aimed at small teams, and more precisely at the technically confident person inside them: whoever currently pays for Slack, Notion, Linear and a CRM separately and would rather run one system on their own servers. What makes the repository worth a look is less the feature list than the licensing decision behind it: a venture-funded New York startup published the whole product, not a cut-down community edition.
What it does
Macro is one app covering the pieces of a work stack a reader already recognises:
- email and team chat
- documents and tasks
- calls
- a CRM
- AI coding agents
The modules are tied together by what the project calls shared team memory, so an AI agent can act across all of them rather than inside one silo. The company's own marketing line is "Replace 27+ apps with Macro", which is a claim by the vendor, not a measurement.
The product did not start here. Macro launched in 2020 as a narrower tool: an AI-assisted PDF and DOCX editor that automatically picked out key terms, cross-references and errors inside documents. It pivoted in 2026 into the full workspace, and that workspace is what this repository ships.
How it works
The frontend is SolidJS, running as a web app, a Tauri desktop build and on mobile. The backend is Rust, and the project describes it as split into 42 deployable services. Those architecture numbers come from the project's own description of itself.
The licence is AGPLv3. The company states explicitly that it is "not open core", meaning the entire application can be self-hosted for free rather than a stripped core with the useful parts held back. AGPLv3 is a strong copyleft licence, so modifying Macro and offering it to others over a network carries source-publication obligations: worth reading before you fork it for a product.
For context on who is behind it: Macro was founded in 2020 by CEO Jacob Beckerman (ex-Bridgewater) and Lev Breydo. It raised a $9.3M seed in 2023 led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Craft, BoxGroup and 3kVC, then a $12M Series A in November 2024, also a16z-led, for more than $30M total. The repository stood at 5.6k stars and 533 forks when these notes were taken.
Getting started
The code lives at github.com/macro-inc/macro. The project does not state operating system, chip, memory or disk requirements in the material available here, so treat hardware sizing as an open question and plan around the backend instead: 42 services is a real deployment, not a single binary on a laptop.
Costs split in two. The software itself is free under AGPLv3, including the parts a hosted plan would charge for. The intelligence is not: the AI features need a model, and whatever API key you connect is billed to you. The video's framing is that the $200 plan becomes free to host, model costs aside, and that caveat is the whole point. Nothing in the material says a local model is supported, so do not assume you can avoid API fees that way until the repository confirms it.
One honest gap: the copy of the README available here is cut off before any build or install instructions, so there is no command to quote. Take the exact setup steps from the repository itself.
When to use it / when not
The main catch is operational, not functional: self-hosting means standing up and keeping alive a Rust backend of 42 services, and the full workspace form of the product only appeared in 2026, so it is young in this shape.
Use it instead of Slack, Notion, Linear and a CRM when you have someone who genuinely enjoys running infrastructure, you want your team's messages, documents and customer records on hardware you control, and a per-seat bill across four vendors has become the bigger problem.
Don't use it if nobody on the team wants to be on call for a multi-service deployment, or if you need the mature integrations and support contracts that come with the incumbents. In that case the hosted version of Macro, or the existing stack, is the cheaper choice once your own time is counted.
Alternatives
Macro positions itself against tools the reader already pays for: Slack for chat, Notion for docs, Linear for tasks, Salesforce or HubSpot for CRM, and Superhuman for email. Each of those does its one job with more polish and no servers to run. The earlier 2023 Macro product was pitched instead against ordinary Adobe-style PDF editors, which is a different comparison entirely and not what this repository is now.
Macro is useful to two kinds of reader. One is the small team with in-house ops capacity that wants to collapse a four-vendor stack into something it owns outright, and can afford the setup work in exchange for dropping the subscriptions. The other is anyone who builds software and wants to study a serious, funded product released whole rather than hollowed out: a SolidJS and Rust codebase of this size, under AGPLv3, is a rare thing to be able to read. Everyone else should wait for the self-hosting story to get simpler.