AUTOMATER.ai

Automater Lite is a free desktop tray app for Windows x64, Apple Silicon macOS, and Linux x86_64 (AppImage or .deb — no Intel Mac build, no Windows/Linux arm64 yet). It reads the session files that AI coding tools already write to disk and normalizes them into one local, searchable library, with no server round-trip required. The vendor claims support for 45 session formats, including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Grok, Kimi, Qwen, Z.ai, OpenCode, Cursor, VS Code, Copilot and Aider, with one-click resume back into the originating CLI for 11 of them — we could not independently verify the full count. It also surfaces a "Needs You" flag the moment an agent is waiting on a permission or input, and a single usage meter the vendor says spans nine provider quota systems. None of this requires an account or payment, and per the Terms, "Needs You and approval visibility are never gated" behind PRO.

Automater PRO is a $50/year subscription, billed annually through Stripe; the current introductory offer is $15 for the first year, renewing at $50/year after (confirmed on automater.ai/terms, effective 2026-09-26). It adds the controls that act rather than just observe: chat and computer control from the tray, managed sessions with inline replies, a "Fleet" view with integration health across machines, built-in tools and pop-out mini-apps, and a metered cloud voice option (local dictation stays free and on-device; cloud voice is PRO-only and sends audio/text to Automater's servers and, depending on route, to OpenAI, Groq, Deepgram, ElevenLabs or Meta). Your session library stays a local file and remains searchable whether or not you ever pay.

Automater Desktop is a different, more ambitious app — a full workspace with chat, a session/project explorer, a built-in Chromium browser, terminals, and a live topology view of hosts, WSL runtimes and Docker stacks. As of today, the product's own download page and the site's download overlay both state: "Desktop downloads are paused for new installs while we finish a review. Existing installs keep updating." The product's own status panel on /desktop marks its core workspace and local runtimes as "Beta," remote fleet as "Limited," and public launch as "Coming soon." If you don't already have it installed, you can join a waitlist but cannot download it today; Automater Lite is unaffected and remains downloadable.

Automater's privacy policy (effective 2026-09-26) is unusually specific for a product this young: it names exact telemetry events, upload intervals (about 20 seconds after launch, then every 15 minutes), retention windows per data category, and every subprocessor (Stripe for billing, Cloudflare for delivery and encrypted R2 backups, Sentry for crash reports, and named voice providers when Cloud Voice is used). Session content itself is explicitly excluded from usage statistics. An optional encrypted local-session backup (AES-256-GCM, key held in the OS credential store) is limited to paid "workspace" account plans, not included in PRO. One caveat worth weighing: the optional "AI Network" beta routes inter-device traffic through Automater's own hub, and the policy states plainly that "the private network alone does not provide end-to-end encryption against the hub operator" for traffic your own apps don't already encrypt.

Automater's public changelog shows its first production release (v0.1.6) on 2026-08-28, with releases landing nearly every few days since — it was at v0.1.27 as of 2026-10-07, still pre-1.0. The legal entity behind it is WEBRULON LLC, a New York LLC (per the Terms of Service and the domain's RDAP registrant record, Russell Winslow). The company's GitHub organization was created 2026-09-01 and holds exactly one public repository — a thin MCP-server/skill plugin, not the application itself, which ships closed-source as signed installers. We found no independent press coverage or reviews; search results surface only other AI-tool directory/aggregator sites (the same genre of listing as this one), not journalism or user reviews with any track record.