About Automation Squad
Automation Squad is an automation agency and product studio. We build the plumbing — custom MCP servers, connectors, agent skills, micro-SaaS, prompt packs, process automations — and this site is where we show our work in public.
The rankings you see here follow one rule: no terminal required. If a recommendation can’t be executed by a competent person with a browser, a company card and forty minutes, it doesn’t belong on the site. The things we build for clients go a lot deeper than that — but the promise to readers stays the same either way: we tell you what actually works, and we show the math.
I’m an operator, not a reporter. I’ve spent 25+ years in programming, marketing, ecommerce and automation — writing code, running stores, buying ads, and wiring the systems underneath all three. These days I run several small businesses, consult on AI and process automation, and write — including The AI Five, this site’s daily briefing. The automations my businesses actually run on — client intake, reporting, the follow-up that used to eat a Tuesday — are the same kind we build for clients. The tools reviewed here are tools I have reason to use, because something in my week depends on them working. That’s a different vantage point from a journalist covering a launch. Better in some ways, worse in others, and it’s worth saying which.
Better: I find the thing that breaks in week three. The demo always works. The seat limit, the export format, the way the admin console handles someone leaving the company — those show up later, and they’re what actually decides whether a tool sticks.
Worse: my sample is my own businesses. Small teams, service work, marketing and operations. If you run a 4,000-seat regulated enterprise, some of what’s here won’t map cleanly to your procurement reality, and I’d rather flag that up front than pretend otherwise.
There is no editorial team. No panel of experts, no anonymous “our researchers.” When you read something here, it came from one person with a name and an email address.
Who it’s for
Executives and senior managers, roughly 40 to 60, who are technically literate but not technical. You can read a contract, chair a meeting and spot a bad forecast. You have never opened a command line and have no plans to start.
The bet behind the site is that this audience gets served badly. AI coverage skews to two extremes: breathless launch coverage that tells you nothing operational, or engineer-facing tutorials that assume you’re comfortable with an API key. Neither helps a COO decide whether to put an AI assistant in front of sixty people.
What we build
Custom MCP servers that put your systems within reach of any AI assistant. Connectors between the tools you already run. Agent skills — packaged playbooks an AI agent can load and actually follow. Micro-SaaS. Prompt packs tested against real work. And end-to-end process automations: intake, reporting, follow-up, the whole Tuesday. Some of it we give away, some of it we charge for, and all of it runs in our own businesses before it ships to yours.
The big one is Automation Squad OS — coming soon. An entire automation operating system: think n8n meets Claude Code, visual process automation fused with an agent workforce that plans, builds, runs and repairs its own workflows. Two more things arrive alongside it: a self-serve catalog, where the automations, skills, MCPs and connectors we’ve built can be bought individually like any other product, and a productized service — subscription automation done the DesignJoy way: flat monthly fee, unlimited requests handled one at a time, pause whenever you like. No scoping calls, no proposals, no retainers.
What’s on the site
SquadScore™-scored tools across 1 category (10 tools and counting), role-specific best lists, head-to-head comparisons, how-to guides, runnable prompts, and news you can act on the same day. The rankings are the shop window — proof we know the territory, kept honest by a published formula.
What we sell — and what we never will
We sell our own work: consulting, custom builds, and soon the catalog and the subscription service above. What is not for sale, at any price, is a ranking. No sponsored posts, no paid placements, no vendor money behind any score — as of August 2026 the rankings themselves have never taken a cent, and if the way this site earns ever changes, it gets disclosed on this page and in the editorial policy before it changes, not after.
What we don’t do
We don’t run a lab. There is no bench here, no automated benchmark harness, no latency rig. Read how we test for what that means in practice.
We don’t publish a leaderboard we can’t show the math for. Every ranking traces back to the SquadScore™ methodology, including the weights, the bounds and the version number.
We don’t guess at specs. A missing price is a missing price. Blank cells are honest; invented ones corrupt everything downstream.
Contact
Corrections, disputed specs, vendor queries: the address on the editorial policy page — or write directly to [email protected]. Corrections get read first and answered fastest.