Guide
Business process automation services without the BPMN diagram.
Most business process automation services sell you a modeling suite and a six month engagement. Clone takes a plain English instruction, drafts every action across your real apps, and lines them up in a review queue so you approve the batch in one reply. $49 a month.
What the category gets wrong.
Search the category and you find two extremes. On one side, enterprise BPM suites: Appian, Pega, Nintex, ProcessMaker, Kissflow. They ask you to model the process as a diagram before they automate anything. That is months of modeling workshops before a single invoice goes out.
On the other side, fire-and-forget triggers: Zapier, Make, and the RPA bots that record a click path and replay it. Fast to set up, brittle when the UI changes, and dangerous the moment the automation starts emailing real clients before you noticed the prompt was wrong.
The missing shape is obvious in hindsight. You want the agent to do the work, and you want one place to scan what it is about to do before it ships. That is the whole product.
The primitive
The review queue is the automation.
Here is a real run from the product. You ask for four post-kickoff follow-ups. Clone opens Gmail, drafts each one with the post-kickoff-checkintemplate, personalizes each message from last week's call notes, and hands you a single four-row queue. You reply once. The batch ships.
Clone Opening Gmail...
Clone Drafting 4 follow-up emails using
template: 'post-kickoff-checkin'
Clone Personalizing each with notes from
last week's calls.
▸ Sarah @ Acme ready to review
▸ Daniel @ Nexora ready to review
▸ Priya @ Holloway ready to review
▸ Miguel @ Stellar ready to review
You: Send them all.
Clone ✓ Sent.This is the shape no BPM suite and no trigger-based tool delivers. BPM suites route individual items through swimlane approvals designed for a compliance team, not a founder. Zapier fires per trigger the moment data arrives. RPA replays a recorded click path with no checkpoint. Clone batches the work, surfaces the intent, and waits for one sentence from you before touching a real client.
Three processes that fit this shape.
Weekly invoicing across Timely, QuickBooks, HubSpot, and Notion
Clone pulls billable hours, generates invoices, and queues them for you on Monday at 8am. You scan six rows, catch the one that had a rate change mid-engagement, edit it in place, approve the rest. The outreach gets logged in HubSpot and a Friday retro draft appears in Notion.
Lead triage and CRM hygiene
New form submissions get enriched from LinkedIn, scored against your ideal profile, and queued as a review list. Qualified leads get a personalized intro draft, unqualified ones a polite decline, stale deals get a nudge. You approve the list; the CRM updates itself.
Contract close-out and filing
Signed SOWs get filed to the correct Drive folder, the engagement gets marked active in HubSpot, the kickoff email is drafted with the right assistant cc'd when the contract is above $10K. The queue shows you every action about to happen. You say ship it.
Clone vs. the rest of the category.
Four common approaches to automating a business process. Only one of them combines plain English input, real app operation, and a human approval gate by default.
| Capability | Clone | BPM suite | RPA bot | Zapier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain English process definition | ||||
| No BPMN diagrams or flow builder | ||||
| Batch-then-approve review queue | ||||
| Works against apps with no API | ||||
| Survives UI changes without rerecording | ||||
| Install to first automated process in under an hour | ||||
| Under $100 per month | ||||
| Typical cost | $49/mo | $50K+ rollout | $10K+ per bot | $20 to $599/mo |
Common questions.
How is this different from traditional business process automation services like Appian, Nintex, or Kissflow?
Traditional BPA services make you model the process first. You draw a BPMN diagram, define swimlanes, wire approval nodes, map data fields, and hand it to IT. Clone skips that entire layer. You type the process as a sentence, it drafts the actions in your existing apps, and it waits for you to approve the batch before anything ships. There is no diagram, no admin console, no implementation partner.
Is this RPA with a nicer interface?
No. RPA tools like UiPath and Automation Anywhere record click paths against specific element selectors. When the UI changes, the bot breaks and someone has to rerecord. Clone reads the screen the way a person does, so a button that moved or a renamed field does not break the run. It also asks for approval on a batch, which RPA bots do not do by default.
What does a review queue actually look like?
When you ask Clone to send four post-kickoff follow-ups, it opens Gmail, drafts each message personalized with notes from last week's calls, and lines them up as a four-row queue: Sarah at Acme ready to review, Daniel at Nexora ready to review, Priya at Holloway ready to review, Miguel at Stellar ready to review. You reply 'Send them all' and it fires all four. You can also pick them off one at a time or edit the template in place.
Why does the approval gate matter for process automation?
Most process automation fails on the last mile: a bad draft goes out to a real client and someone has to apologize. Zapier fires per trigger, so by the time you notice the mistake you have already sent 40 emails. Clone collapses a batch into one human checkpoint. You scan the list, catch the one row that looks wrong, and only then ship. It is the same shape as a pull request review but for business work.
Can Clone run processes without approval when I trust them?
Yes. Schedule a recurring job in plain English and skip the review gate for steps you have already validated. A common pattern is Monday 8am: pull billable hours from Timely, generate invoices in QuickBooks, email them, log outreach in HubSpot, draft the Friday retro in Notion. The approval gate is the default, not a requirement.
What does it cost compared to a typical BPA engagement?
A mid-market BPA rollout through Appian, Pega, or a boutique implementation partner runs into five and six figures between licenses, consulting, and the quarters of modeling work before anything automates. A human virtual assistant is $3,000 to $6,000 per month. Clone is $49 per month and starts operating your tools within ten minutes of install.
Will it work with my legacy or industry-specific software?
Yes. Because Clone reads the UI and clicks the buttons, it does not need a public API. Desktop QuickBooks, a custom CRM someone built in Filemaker, a niche law practice management tool, a spreadsheet with a decade of conditional formatting: all fair game. If a person can drive it on screen, Clone can.
Automate a process this week, not this quarter.
Install Clone, describe one recurring process in a sentence, and review the batch it hands back. Ship it or cancel.