An AI that stays quiet until something you care about actually happens.

Another daily digest isn't the point

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can all send you a morning summary now. If that's all you want, use them. Honestly.

What they don't do well is watch. You don't want a message every day. You want one message, the day the right job gets posted, or the price finally drops, or a competitor quietly changes their pricing page. Every other day, silence.

That's the Watcher, and it's the heart of this kit. You write what you're waiting for the way you'd say it to a person, point it at the places to look, and it checks every morning. No match, no message.

{
  "name": "Remote PM job",
  "when": "A remote product manager job is posted at an AI or developer-tools company",
  "sources": [
    { "name": "We Work Remotely", "url": "https://weworkremotely.com/categories/remote-product-jobs.rss", "type": "feed" }
  ]
}

That's a whole watch. It works on job board feeds, blogs, news sites, and plain web pages, where it keeps a snapshot and checks what changed since yesterday.

What people point it at

The three employees

• →Watcher. "Tell me when X happens." Checks your feeds and pages every morning, silent unless something matches.
• →Weekly Review. Reads the notes file you keep and writes an honest review of your week every Sunday.
• →Morning Brief. A short brief each morning from the exact sources you pick (specific feeds, subreddits, job boards, pages), not whatever an assistant thinks matters.

Hire one, two, or all three. A five-minute interview (npm run hire) asks what you care about and writes the setup files for you.

Why it's built this way

• →Runs with your laptop closed, nothing to host. A workflow is included that runs your employees free on GitHub's computers: Watcher and Brief every day, Review on Sundays. This is the part most people never get working, so it's done for you.
• →You own it. It's a private repo in your GitHub. The prompts, the memory, the outputs, the logs: all files you can read. Nobody can retire it on you.
• →Any model, one key. One OpenRouter key gets you the cheap, balanced, or best model, and you can switch any time.
• →It can't run up your bill. Three spending caps (per call count, per run, per month) are checked before every model call, plus the credit limit you set on the key itself. Every call is logged, so cost is a number, not a guess.
• →Read-only by design. It reads public feeds and pages and your own files. It never posts, buys, or replies to anyone.
• →A screen for bad web content. A second, cheaper model called Jev checks what the employees read for relevance and for hidden text trying to give orders to an AI, before the main model sees it.
• →Small enough to read. Zero npm packages. You, or your own AI, can read every line.

What it costs to run

You pay OpenRouter directly for the model, pay as you go. Estimates for all three employees together, from real runs:

Choice	Model	About
Cheap	GPT-6 Luna	$0.06 a month
Balanced (default)	Claude Sonnet 5.5	$1.15 a month
Best	Claude Opus 5.5	$2.30 a month

A quiet day for the Watcher costs nothing and sends nothing.

How it works

This is for you if

• →You're waiting on something specific (a job, a price, a listing, a page change) and you're tired of checking
• →You want AI that does a real job on a schedule, not another chat window
• →You'd rather own a small thing you understand than rent a big thing you don't
• →You want to learn the pattern so you can build employee number four yourself (there's a guide for that in the repo)

This isn't for you if

• ×You only want a daily news summary and already pay for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Use theirs.
• ×You want an agent that acts for you: answers email, books, buys. This one only reads and reports, on purpose.
• ×You won't make a GitHub account or an OpenRouter key under any circumstances.
• ×You need it to read your private inbox or calendar. It reads the public web and your own files.

What's not included

• ×Your model bill. You pay OpenRouter directly, about $0.06 to $2.30 a month depending on the model you pick.
• ×1-on-1 support. The README covers setup and the common errors. Stuck on something it doesn't cover? Email nate@nateneedham.com.
• ×An uptime promise. It runs on GitHub's free scheduler, which can run a few minutes late when GitHub is busy.

Questions

Do I need to know how to code?

No. You'll paste a few commands into a terminal and answer questions in plain English. You need Node 18 or newer installed (free, from nodejs.org). If you can follow a recipe, you can set this up.

What's GitHub Actions?

GitHub's free scheduler. It runs your employees on GitHub's computers on a timetable, so they work while your laptop is closed. A private repo gets 2,000 free minutes a month, and a short daily job uses far less than that.

Anything I should know about the schedule?

One thing. Setup tells you to make your repo private. If you make it public instead, GitHub switches off scheduled jobs after 60 days with no activity. Either way, npm run status warns you when nothing has run for 48 hours, and turning it back on is one click.

Why OpenRouter?

One key, every major model. You pick cheap, balanced, or best during setup and can change it any time. It's pay as you go and separate from any ChatGPT or Claude subscription. Set a credit limit on the key and it can never spend more than that.

Can I run it on my own computer instead?

Yes. Point Task Scheduler (Windows) or cron (Mac, Linux) at it. It only runs while the machine is awake, which is why the GitHub option exists.

How do the alerts reach me?

You choose during setup: a file in the repo, the screen, Discord, or email.

What if it's not for me?

Not working for you? Email nate@nateneedham.com within 14 days for a full refund.

When you outgrow it

This kit is the version you own and run alone, and for a lot of people it's all they'll ever need. If you get to the point where you want the whole system I run my businesses on, with the database, the dashboards, and a full team of AI employees, installed with you 1-on-1, that's the Marketing System Install.