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The AI Employee That Runs in Your VPC

Matthew, founder of Bob · July 6, 2026

Key takeaways: For most teams, cloud is the right answer. But if your compliance posture says company data doesn't leave your network, most of this product category simply exits the conversation. Bob doesn't: the same gateway, connectors, and sandboxed runners we operate in our cloud ship as containers you run inside your own VPC.

The conversation that ends most AI evaluations

It usually happens in the third meeting. Security asks: "Where does our data go?" And for nearly every AI teammate on the market the honest answer is "to us, and to our model provider, and here's our SOC 2." Sometimes that's enough. In healthcare, finance, legal, government — and increasingly in any European procurement process — it often isn't, and no feature list changes that. The product is disqualified on architecture.

We built for that conversation. Bob self-hosted is not a lite version or a partner reseller — it's the same images our own cloud runs, composed with docker compose inside your VPC. Your Slack messages, connector tokens, run history, memory, artifacts: all of it stays in a Postgres you operate, on disks you control.

What actually leaves your network

Exactly one thing: a daily license report. It contains five values:

  1. License id.
  2. Current month.
  3. Count of runs.
  4. Credit total.
  5. Seat count.

That's the entire payload. We never see message content, prompts, connector data, or run output. We publish the payload's full schema in our self-hosting docs, because "trust us" is not a compliance posture. Your model API calls go to your model provider under your own key and agreement — we're not in that path either.

What you give up (honesty section)

Self-hosting is a real operational commitment, and pretending otherwise would be marketing. You run the containers, the database, the reverse proxy, and the upgrades. Managed OAuth for certain connectors is cloud-only — a self-hosted deployment brings its own provider credentials. If you don't have an ops team, the answer is our cloud, and that's most teams — it's why we run one.

Who this is for

Teams with data-residency requirements. Regulated industries with an architecture-review gate. Companies whose own customers contractually demand in-tenancy processing. And, frankly, anyone who wants leverage in a vendor negotiation: a product you could take in-house is a product that has to keep earning your renewal.

FAQ

Is self-hosted Bob feature-complete?

The agent, connectors, approvals, audit log, schedules, memory, and admin UI are identical. Optional cloud-assisted integrations degrade gracefully when unconfigured.

What happens if we cancel?

Your instance keeps booting and your data stays fully readable — new work pauses until the license renews. Nothing bricks, nothing is deleted. It's your infrastructure; we just stop selling you updates.

What are the prerequisites?

Docker with Compose v2, a Slack app you create from our manifest, your model API key, and an HTTPS-reachable endpoint for Slack's webhooks. A competent ops engineer has it running in an afternoon.

See it running inside your own VPC.

The first ten teams onboard with the founder — 50% off Managed for year one and 3× credits for 90 days, in exchange for a monthly 30-minute feedback call.

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