Okou is built for teams, but it works just as well for one. Solo professionals, side-project builders, consultants, and indie founders all use Okou the same way: as a personal AI teammate that gets actual work done across the tools you already use.
The team-vs-individual distinction is mostly about billing and visibility, not capability. A solo workspace has access to every workflow, every connector, and every channel the largest workspace has — minus the multi-member overhead.
Personal preferences and reusable methods
With My Okou, edit your personal Instructions under Settings → Personal → My Okou. They apply only to you in this workspace, starting with the next work Okou begins. Save a repeatable task as a Private Workflow; add a member-owned Automation when it needs a schedule or supported event. In Legacy Agents, continue using the selected Agent's Instructions. See My Okou and legacy Agents.
Common solo use cases
What individuals reach for most, in roughly the order they tend to adopt:
- Inbox and calendar discipline. A daily morning brief + an evening inbox cleanup. The two highest-leverage automations for anyone whose calendar fills up faster than their attention.
- Research and reading. A weekly competitor or industry digest. Account briefs before sales calls. Quick "what is this thing" lookups during the day.
- Content production. Blog drafts, social posts, newsletters. Individuals lean on Okou heavily for the first pass — it doesn't replace voice, but it skips the blank-page step.
- Side-project automation. Building, shipping, and monitoring a small product. Okou handles the GitHub side: triage, small fixes, release notes, deployments through Vercel.
- Personal accounting and admin. Receipts in, categorized out. Tax-time prep. Invoicing follow-ups for consultants.
- Customer-facing work for solo consultants. Reply drafts, scheduling, contract drafts, follow-ups.
A typical solo Okou workspace ends up with 5–10 workflows and 2–3 automations. That's enough to take a meaningful chunk of work off your plate without becoming a thing you maintain.
Setup: a half hour to fully operational
A pragmatic path from sign-up to "Okou is doing useful work":
- Connect 2–3 core tools. Whatever your work mostly lives in. For most people: Gmail or Outlook, a calendar, and one of {Notion, Linear, GitHub, Slack}.
- Write your first prompt as a chat. Something concrete: "Summarize my unread inbox and tell me what needs a reply today." Iterate until the result is useful.
- Turn it into an automation. "Run this every weekday at 9 a.m. and email me the result." That's your morning brief.
- Save useful chats as workflows. "Turn this into a reusable workflow called
weekly-newsletter-draft." Now you can invoke it by name later. - Hook up additional connectors when a workflow needs them — Okou asks at the right time.
Most solo workspaces hit "Okou is paying its way" within the first week.
How billing works for one person
- Plan fee plus a member package. Paid plans bill monthly even when idle. Pro starts at $20/month for one member; usage consumes the credits in that member's package.
- Free to start. A new workspace begins with 1,000 starter credits valid for 30 days and then stays on Free. Credit top-ups and auto-recharge are paid-plan features, so Free is a place to evaluate Okou rather than a place to buy more credits.
- Plan credits don't roll over. Credits granted by a paid plan are scoped to the current billing cycle and expire at the end of it. Top-up credits never expire.
- Personal subscription routing. An eligible personal Claude or Codex subscription can be used on Free and paid plans. Shared organization API keys and custom gateways require a paid plan. Tool calls, generation, and storage still use Okou credits. Configure routing under Settings → Models — see Credits & billing.
- Auto-recharge available on paid plans. Set a threshold and an amount; the workspace tops itself up when needed. A common setting: "recharge $20 when the balance drops below $5."
Your bill depends on the plan fee, member package, and any extra credits you use. Image generation can consume more credits than text and tool calls; review the run's cost breakdown before requesting many variations.
Privacy
A personal workspace is yours alone. There are no teammates, no admins, no shared visibility:
- Workflows you create stay private unless you mark them public.
- Automations and their run histories are visible only to you.
- Chats are visible only to you.
- Connector tokens are scoped to your account; they can't be used outside this workspace.
Okou staff cannot read your chat content; the platform has admin tools but they're scoped to billing, abuse detection, and explicit support requests you initiate.
A few patterns that work especially well solo
- The standing morning brief. It's the gateway drug. Once it works, the rest of Okou's value is easier to see.
- The weekly newsletter draft. Email creators love this. Topic from research, draft from your past pieces, scheduled for Friday afternoon review.
- The expense-report workflow. Forward a receipt, get a properly categorized expense logged to your accounting tool. Tax season becomes a non-event.
- The "explain like I'm running" task. For founders and PMs: a workflow that takes a Notion doc and rewrites it as a one-page exec summary.
- The launch-week bundle. A workflow that produces blog post + LinkedIn + X thread + social cards + email all from one input. A solo founder's launch day in one prompt.
When to graduate to a team workspace
The signals:
- More than one person needs to call Okou in the same context (employees, contractors, agency partners)
- You want reviewed Workflows and results available to others; Automation ownership remains personal
- You need consolidated billing and reporting
- You want admin controls on connectors (who can connect what)
- Compliance asks for audit logs across multiple users
Before inviting teammates, review Workflow visibility and recurring work. Sharing a method does not transfer your accounts, private Chats, or automation ownership.
What's next
- See Quickstart for the first task to try.
- See Workflows to make your most repeated prompts reusable.
- See Automations for the recurring work that pays Okou back daily.
