I build for a living, mostly as a fractional CTO, and I got tired of one thing: every time I opened an AI client to help me run my company with a specific client, I had to re-explain the company first. Who the client is. What we invoiced them. When I last talked to them. The AI was smart. It just had no idea what my business actually was.
So we built Founders OS. It is an open-source MCP server that gives your AI client real business context: CRM, financials, tasks, playbooks, guardrails, and a memory layer. You point Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client at it and it can answer across all of that in one shot. Not "here is your CRM data" and separately "here is your ledger." One question, both sources, one answer. Which clients are behind on payment and when did I last contact them. That reads the ledger and the CRM together because they share the same context.
Here is the part I want to talk about, because it was the real decision: it runs over stdio, self-hosted, on your own Postgres DB. No hosted backend in the middle. No account with us. No data leaving your infrastructure unless you decide otherwise.
That was deliberate, and it cost us the easier path.
The easy version is a SaaS backend. You sign up, we hold your data, done. Cleaner install, nicer funnel. But think about what this data is. It is your customer list, your revenue, your unpaid invoices, your private notes on deals, and your knowledge. Data like that should live where you decide it lives, not wherever a vendor's AI feature happens to need it. So we made self-hosted the default and the floor. It is free, open, and yours, and it always will be.
Later we will offer a hosted option for teams that would rather we run the ops than run it themselves. When we do, it keeps the same rule: your data stays in your own database, single tenant, export anytime, no lock-in, and the whole thing stays open source. Convenience is the thing you would be paying for. Ownership is not something you ever hand over.
So the model is: you deploy it, it talks to your own database, and the transport is stdio between your MCP client and the server. Your business context lives where your business already lives. Run it self-hosted and we never see it, and nothing phones home when you close the client.
The tradeoff is real. Self-hosted means you deploy it yourself. There is no magic hosted URL to paste, yet. For a founder or a small team that already runs their own stack, that is a feature, not a chore. You own the whole thing.
It is 100 percent open source and live now. If you run your business through an AI client and you are tired of re-explaining your company every session, this is for you.
Repo: https://github.com/OurThinkTank/founders-os
Site: https://foundersmcp.com
npm: @ourthinktank/founders-os
Built by OurThinkTank. Happy to answer anything in the comments, especially on the self-hosting setup or the memory layer.
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