⚠️ Time-sensitive record. Paperclip.inc announced it is shutting down on 2 October 2026 and no longer accepts new accounts. This page is kept as a dated historical pricing record, not a current recommendation. Captured 2026-09-21.

The short version

Checked against the live Paperclip.inc pricing page on 2026-09-21 (proxied browser session, both billing states exercised; all figures are page text captured from the rendered page, with screenshots). There is exactly one plan and one price:

Paperclip (the only plan)
Monthly $12/month
Annual $120/year (toggle badge: “2 MONTHS FREE”)
Trial 7 days free, no credit card
Tax “Prices include VAT. What you see is what you pay.”
Currency USD default, “Show euros” toggle on the same page
Companies Unlimited, “run as many as you like”
Seats Unlimited teammates, “no per seat fees”
Models “All agents and harnesses, bring your own keys”
Integrations API and MCP access; OpenClaw and Hermes agent adapters named on the card
Hosting “EU hosting end to end, GDPR native”

And one thing no pricing table can capture, because it is a banner, not a tier:

“Paperclip.inc is shutting down on 2 October 2026 and no longer accepts new accounts.”

We captured this on September 21. The product ends in eleven days.

The “2 months free” badge is arithmetically honest

We check save-banner math on every pricing page we capture (ClickUp’s “Save up to 30%” turned out to understate its own Business tier at 36.8% in our 2026-09-18 audit). Paperclip’s passes:

  • Monthly: $12 × 12 = $144/year.
  • Annual: $120/year.
  • Difference: $24 — exactly two $12 months. The “2 MONTHS FREE” badge is literal, not a rounded “up to.”

That also means the effective annual discount is 16.7%, and unlike per-seat SaaS there is no unit to multiply by: companies, teammates, agents, and harnesses are all flat-included. The metered part is deliberately outside the price — “bring your own keys” means model usage bills through your own provider account. The page’s own FAQ list (“What does model usage cost?”, “Could usage run up a surprise bill?”) shows the vendor knows where the real cost hides; the FAQ answers sit behind accordions and were not part of this capture’s evidence set.

The dead “What this means” link — captured 2026-09-21

The shutdown banner ends in a “What this means” link. In the page’s live DOM on 2026-09-21, that anchor resolves to:

href="/auth/sign-up"

Clicking “what does your shutdown mean” takes you to the sign-up page of a service that explicitly no longer accepts new accounts (“no longer accepts new accounts” is the banner’s own words, one DOM node away). Whether this is a stale template link or an intentional funnel (affected users → sign in → export) is not stated anywhere on the page. A customer looking for data-export instructions or a refund path gets a registration form instead.

What Paperclip was, per the page itself

Positioning line: “The 24/7 control plane for AI-run companies.” The pitch is hosting something you could run yourself — “Everything you would get self-hosting Paperclip, without running it yourself” — built on an MIT-licensed open-source core (“Built on open source”, a GitHub count of 81.2k rendered in the footer). Pre-built company templates are listed in the nav capture (Agency Agents, AgentSys Engineering, ClawTeam, Aeon Intelligence). The feature nav — Approvals (“You’re the board on every decision”), Costs (“Spend hits the cap, not the bill”), Goals (“Lineage from company to task”), Routines & heartbeats (“Work runs without you”) — describes an agent-management layer, not a chatbot.

That roadmap is now moot for the hosted product. Two survival paths remain for anyone attracted to the concept: the open-source core (self-host, MIT), or nothing. This is why this page exists in our index despite the shutdown: as a dated record of what the hosted tier cost, and what its own billing page looked like eleven days before the end.

What we did not verify

  • Nothing behind the trial — new accounts are refused at the door, so no signup, no product test, no FAQ-accordion answers as evidence.
  • Refund, proration, or end-of-life terms for annual subscribers. The pricing page shows “Cancel anytime” but no shutdown-specific policy; the page that should explain it is the dead link above.
  • EUR amounts (the “Show euros” toggle was not exercised to screenshot standard).
  • Status of the open-source project post-shutdown (GitHub repo state was not part of this run).

Verdict (terms-level, no score)

No rating. As pricing-page craftsmanship: single SKU, VAT-inclusive flat prices, exact discount math, BYO-keys honesty about where costs actually land — a clean sheet. As a purchase decision in September 2026: the page says the product ends on October 2 and won’t take new accounts, while still rendering an active “Start hiring” button above the fold. The two most useful facts on this page contradict its own call to action.

Methodology & sources

  • paperclip.inc/pricing — captured 2026-09-21 (UTC), proxied real-Chromium session; page text dumped in full for both billing states (eval-ops/runs/2026-09-21-group9/paperclip_pricing.txt, paperclip_pricing_annual.txt); screenshots pcl-01-01-pricing.png (monthly) and pcl-01-02-pricing-annual.png (annual toggle exercised). The dead-link target was read from the live anchor’s href in the same session.
  • No third-party pricing sources used — single-SKU product, page is the product.
  • Checked 2026-09-21. The shutdown date (2026-10-02) will be in the past shortly after this publishes; the page keeps this article as a historical pricing record, not a recommendation.

Paperclip is shutting down, so the decision is really about what replaces it notion pricing — Notion’s per-seat pricing, including the 1,000-block free rule; notebooklm pricing — NotebookLM’s pricing and its current limits; notion ai pricing — Notion AI as the paid add-on you would be replacing.