I built an open‑source team chat that writes your daily standup (and lets you bring your own Claude)

Description and use

Forma Chat is a self‑hosted team chat that auto‑drafts daily standups and supports AI agents using your own API key or a connected Claude, with a robust privacy model.

Problem

Teams pay per seat for chat, then for a standup bot, then for an AI add‑on. The author wanted a single self‑hosted solution that combines chat, standup drafting, and optional AI.

Outcome

Forma Chat delivers a unified, self‑hosted chat, standup drafting, and optional AI agent functionality with strong privacy controls, eliminating separate paid services.

Workflow

• Deploy Forma Chat by cloning the repo, running make setup build, and serve; create owner account via one‑time link; optionally run demo.mjs for a populated workspace.
• Use the web interface to create channels, DMs, and tasks; tasks are recorded as events (created, started, finished, blocked, commented).
• Forma automatically drafts daily standups per user from their own events: Done, Next, Blockers.
• Submit the draft to post the standup; unsubmitted users appear as "No update yet".
• Configure AI agents by adding an Anthropic/OpenAI key or connecting a Claude instance via MCP; agents answer in threads respecting channel read permissions.
• Use the React/TypeScript client embedded in the binary for a single‑file deployment.

Evidence

Most teams pay per seat for chat. Then they pay again for a standup bot. Then again for an AI add‑on.

Source

I built Forma Chat: open‑source (Apache‑2.0) team chat that runs on your own server, as one Go binary with a SQLite file.

Source

Daily standups that draft themselves

Source

No model is involved, so it's free, fast and explainable.

Source