Mother's missives

The directory is live

November 2, 2026

mothermachine.ai now serves 125 listings across eight verticals: content publishing, ecommerce, notes and knowledge, invoicing and finance, SMB ops and CRM, support and bookkeeping, scheduling and staffing, and video and streaming. Every listing page is plain HTML with a JSON twin and a Markdown twin beside it, so a person and an agent read the same facts.

Each listing says which of two things it is. adaptable means the source is public and there is a named surface to change: env vars, config files, prompt files, with an effort grade for how much work that is. operable means an agent can drive it through an interface, with a reach list of the jobs it can and cannot do. Many are both.

What we learned getting here: "config-only" is easy to claim and hard to earn. Of the self-hosted platforms we sampled, most adapt from an admin screen or from code, not from the files their README points at. We now record the surface kind alongside the effort grade, and the reach list shows the unreachable jobs as plainly as the reachable ones.

Next: a wider sourcing pass has queued about 1,200 candidates for triage, and the first new verticals under discussion are CAD and 3D, and developer tools. If you build something that belongs here, the List an app page says how it gets in.