Macro Folds Slack, Linear, and Notion Into One Repo You Can Run Yourself

Macro puts email, chat, docs, tasks, calls, and a CRM in one AGPLv3 codebase with a shared graph underneath, against the roughly $51 per seat per month a team already pays for Slack, Linear, and Notion.

A 20-person company running Slack Business+, Linear Business, and Notion Business pays about $51 per seat per month at list price: $15 for Slack on annual billing, $16 for Linear on annual, $20 for Notion. Call it $12,240 a year for three systems that know nothing about each other, and that number is before you add email tooling or a CRM. Macro, which sits at number 7 on GitHub Trending today after picking up 1,180 stars in a single day, is a complete workspace with email, chat, docs, tasks, calls, and a CRM in one codebase, released under AGPLv3, and you can run the whole thing on your own infrastructure.

The feature list is not the story

On paper the scope reads like a dare: email, channels, tasks, markdown docs, a 2D canvas, agents, recorded calls, file storage, pull requests, and a CRM. Ten products in a Rust and SolidJS app, built by a team of roughly 15 people in New York and Toronto who spent two years running their own company on it before letting anyone else see the source.

The list is the boring part. The graph underneath is what you should actually look at.

Every object in Macro lives in one bidirectional graph, so the links between things are native rather than bolted on afterward. A customer email becomes a task, and the task keeps a pointer back to the email that caused it, so the chain from "why are we doing this" to the shipped pull request stays auditable in one system. Hit cmd+k on a contact and you get every email between your team and that person. Type a company domain and you get every email and file anyone on your team has exchanged with anyone there, without opening HubSpot.

The agents read that same graph. That is the piece worth caring about. An agent asked what your team promised a customer last quarter is not fanning out across five vendor APIs and hoping the joins line up. It is reading one store, with the same permissions as a human user.

The team makes this argument in its own README in unusually blunt language for a launch document. They scaled a previous venture to about 20 people, watched every team adopt its own tools, ended up holding the place together with Zapier and MCP servers, and concluded the company "was not computable."

Who this is actually for

Teams of 5 to 50 where one specific person has quietly become the integration layer. If your ops lead or chief of staff spends a real slice of every week copying context between chat, the tracker, and the doc, that person is the line item Macro is aiming at, not the software invoices.

It also has a genuine answer for the founder who does not want company email sitting in another vendor's cloud. Full source under AGPLv3 since the end of May, a Docker Compose stack in the repo, and daily tagged releases. Version v2026.8.12.0 shipped yesterday, and today's commits added Outlook account linking and drag-to-move calendar events. Whatever else this is, it is not a repo somebody dumped on the internet and walked away from.

Where the self-hosting story gets honest

Self-hosting is free the way a puppy is free. Macro's own FAQ says self-hosting has not been a focus, that the hosted build is the one carrying the iOS app plus Apple, Gmail, and GitHub approvals, and that if you run it yourself you have to maintain your own licenses for LiveKit, FusionAuth, and PostHog or switch those components off. Switching them off means no calls and bring your own auth. Read that plainly: you can self-host the workspace today, but if you want the email and mobile experience the demos show, you are probably running their cloud.

The license cuts both directions. AGPLv3 means anything you build on top and distribute stays open, which is fine for internal use and a real problem if your plan was to wrap it and resell it. There is a commercial license if you ask for one.

Scale is early, too. Two years of daily use by a 15-person team is credible dogfooding, not a deployment hardened across thousands of companies, and 2,483 stars is a rounding error next to the incumbents. Macro's hosted plan is $40 per seat per month, so the fair comparison is not free versus $51. It is $40 for one system instead of $51 for three, or zero in license fees plus your infrastructure bill and the engineer hours to keep it standing.

And the migration is the real invoice regardless. Three tools' worth of history, permissions, and muscle memory costs more to move than any of these subscriptions cost to keep.

So the interesting thing here is not that someone built an open-source Slack. Somebody does that every quarter. It is that the thing on the chopping block was never Slack's $15, or Linear's $16, or Notion's $20. It is the seams between them, and the person on your team who has spent the last two years being the glue.