What Doug is

A system to run your home or office.

For busy parents, young professionals, creatives, business owners, homeowners, people trying to get by, young people — anyone who needs a helping hand keeping the back office of life or work organized, without paying for ten apps to stitch it together.

Who Doug is for

If any of this sounds like your week, Doug is for you.

Different lives, same problem: too many moving pieces, not enough hands.

Busy parents

Keep the household running.

Bills, appointments, the family calendar, the school pickups, the car that needs its oil changed next Tuesday. Doug remembers so you don't have to carry all of it in your head.

Young professionals

Stay on top without paying for ten apps.

Chat, notes, a calendar, a voice agent that can take a call when you can't, invoicing if you side-hustle. One place, one price, not a subscription stack that outgrows your paycheck.

Creatives

More time making, less time managing.

Designers, filmmakers, writers, musicians — Doug handles the business side (ledger, invoices, client comms) so the creative side gets more of your day. Pro-grade tools without the pro-grade bill.

Small business owners

Run the shop without another hire.

Bookkeeping, customer records, agent-answered phone lines, payment links. The back-office work that usually needs a part-time admin — Doug takes a shift at it instead.

Homeowners

Your house is complicated. Doug helps.

Maintenance schedules, vendor contacts, utility accounts, warranty info, the thing you keep meaning to order for the garage. All filed, all findable, all asked-about at the right moment.

People just trying to get by

Organization shouldn't cost a fortune.

Doug's starter tier is priced for real-world budgets because the people who need help most are usually the ones told they can't afford it. The back office of your life shouldn't be a luxury good.

Why Doug exists

The back office is where life gets heavy.

Doug is the helping hand that lightens it.

Everyone you know has a back office. The parent tracking the kids' schedule. The freelancer chasing invoices. The homeowner who can never find the plumber's number when the basement floods. The small-shop owner keeping three spreadsheets because no single app fits how they actually work.

Most of the tools that could help live behind a separate monthly bill. One for notes, another for calls, another for calendar, another for bookkeeping, another for storage, another for voice. Stitch them together and you're paying hundreds a month before you've made anything or solved anything.

Doug collapses that into one system. Chat, voice agents, named calls, bookkeeping, payments, studio — all in one place, all at a price a household or a small office can actually carry. You can leave with your data any time. You only need the tiles your life uses.

The idea is simple: the back office of life shouldn't be a luxury good. If you need a helping hand organizing your world, Doug is that hand.

Who built it

Made by someone in the same shoes.

Doug was built by Sandohill — a designer, filmmaker, storyteller, historian, and family man in Toronto — someone who knows first-hand what it costs to try to accomplish something of worth when every tool you need is a separate monthly bill.

There'll be a team behind Doug in time. Good work scales further with good hands on it, and hiring is part of the plan. What won't change is the starting point: Doug was made by somebody who's been in your shoes, for people still in theirs.

What runs where

Transparent infrastructure.

Every piece of Doug you can see, with a label on it.

The desk

My workstation in Toronto

RTX 2080 Ti running LM Studio with Qwen2.5-Coder-7B (Paul, Doug's reasoning brain) and a Kokoro TTS server for the voice family. Connected to Hetzner via an SSH reverse tunnel.

Paul + Kokoro + voice models
The public face

Hetzner Cloud (Ashburn, VA)

Caddy, pm2, and about a dozen small Node + Python services that handle the public-facing routing, the Named Calls registry, Ledger, Payments, Connect, Reconnect, and all the static sites in the portfolio.

Web face + always-on services
Coming home

Cloud City — my own server build

A 4090-class machine I'm building this month to bring Paul, Kokoro, Thomas-class voice agents, and the video pipeline under my own roof. Hetzner stays as the web face. Cloud City becomes the brain.

Ships around 2026-04-26
Your side

Your own box, if you want it

At OFFICE+ and above, Doug can ship to a box you host (NUC, tower, whatever). Your data stops leaving your building. The reasoning either lives on that box or connects back to Cloud City through an encrypted mesh.

Optional. Most start in the cloud.
The wider portfolio

Doug isn't a startup, it's an ecosystem.

Every site below runs on the same hardware. Doug exposes the ones most useful to a home or office.

How Doug is different

Five things that won't change.

Not a roadmap. The parts that are load-bearing.

01

Sovereignty of the stack

Your data, your reasoning, your voice synth, your hardware. If Doug can't run it on your side of the fence, Doug won't promise it. No OpenAI key hidden in the basement.

02

Named, characterful tech

Paul does the reasoning. Claudia takes the notes. Bob drives Studio. Thomas answers sales. Lily answers service. Richard does follow-up. Every piece has a name because you should know who you're talking to.

03

FOSS-only, by rule

Every model, every library, every mirror that Doug depends on is free and open. No SaaS dependency gets to be a single point of failure. If a vendor rage-quits, Doug doesn't rage-quit with them.

04

Capture everything, throw away nothing

Every call, every message, every ledger entry, every generated clip is saved to your Doug data directory in plain files. You can open it with a text editor. Export is just copying the folder.

05

Craft over shortcut

A module ships when it does what its tile says, not when it looks pretty. The dashboard now shows blue "Coming next" on tiles that aren't real yet, because a pretend-feature is worse than a missing one.

Write. I read my own email.

Questions about pricing, features Doug doesn't have yet, whether this fits your shop, your family, your studio, your office — I'd rather hear it than guess. If Doug's a fit I'll say so. If he isn't, I'll tell you that too.