Quick answer
Mycel acts as the memory a small business runs on and the owner's desk, built specifically for trade shops and appointment businesses. It captures what the team learns—from pricing decisions to installation notes to why you stopped using a certain vendor—in a shared vault of plain-markdown folders that an assistant answers from, showing which documents it read for each answer. When connected with Relay or TradesBackbone for customers, ReputeLift for reviews, and SynthPrism for posts, Mycel becomes the brain of one stack the business runs itself.
At a glance
What it is: A shared vault of plain-markdown folders the team works in, with an assistant that answers from it and shows which documents it read for every reply.
Who it is for: Trade shops (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping and lawn care, cleaning, pest control) and appointment businesses (salons, barbers, lash and brow studios, med spas, tattoo studios, groomers) of about 3 to 25 people.
How it connects: Mycel pairs with Relay or TradesBackbone for customer records, ReputeLift for reviews, and SynthPrism for posts; the connected apps can file what the business learns into the vault.
What it captures: Voice notes, uploaded files, typed notes, and forwarded email all filed and sorted into cards such as tasks, people, follow-ups and prices for a person to review.
How the assistant works: Answers from uploaded spreadsheets down to the named file, sheet and row; each answer shows which vault documents it read, and a reply that read nothing from the vault is marked that way.
Price: Free for one person with 50 AI credits a month; Personal $69/month ($759/year) for one person with own assistant, 1,800 credits and email-in; Personal Plus $119/month ($1,309/year) with every add-on; Business $199/month for 3 people ($2,189/year), each extra seat $59/month up to 25 seats, includes shared vault, team chat, connecting apps, and automations; Enterprise past 25 seats is custom.
Team plan details: Business plan adds shared vault, team chat with channels and direct messages, connecting TradesBackbone or Relay plus ReputeLift and SynthPrism, Today (a list of what is waiting across apps), team roles, private folders, document history with restore, and every add-on except Advanced AI models ($20/month add-on); crew added from TradesBackbone or Relay are free and do not take a seat; Team meetings are $6 per seat a month (video calls with live transcript, notes and action items filed into the vault); annual billing is 12 months for the price of 11.
Key Takeaways
- A shared vault of plain-markdown folders acts as the business's memory, and an assistant answers from it showing which documents it read for each reply.
- Every capture—voice note, uploaded file, typed note, forwarded email—is filed and sorted into cards such as tasks, people, follow-ups and prices for a person to review.
- The assistant answers from uploaded spreadsheets down to the named file, sheet and row, and can turn an answer into a spreadsheet, chart, one-page brief or slide deck.
- Home opens on Today, a list of what is waiting on a person across the connected apps, with which app it came from, why it surfaced, how long it has waited and a link straight to it.
- Typing @assistant in a team chat message gets an answer in the thread from the business vault, and the assistant may offer to file a decision note or add a task, which does nothing until a person approves it.
Why a small business loses what it learns
A plumbing shop with twelve technicians runs into the same problem every business does: what one person knows stays in that person's head until they quit, get sick, or forget. The owner remembers why the shop stopped carrying a certain brand of water heater three years ago, but the new dispatcher books a job that requires it anyway. The lead HVAC tech knows the workaround for a tricky model of furnace controller, but when he takes a week off, the rest of the crew calls him at home. A salon owner negotiates a volume discount with a color supplier and tells the front desk, but six months later a new manager reorders at full price because no one wrote it down.
The knowledge a business accumulates—vendor notes, pricing decisions, installation quirks, why a process changed, who handles what—typically lives in a mix of places: the owner's memory, a chat app where old messages scroll out of view, a shared drive folder no one can navigate, a spreadsheet that three people have conflicting versions of, and email threads that disappear when someone leaves. When the team needs an answer, they either interrupt the person who knows or they guess.
What most tools do and where they stop
Many businesses try a shared drive, a note app, or a chat app with search. A shared drive holds files, but it does not answer questions, and the team has to remember which folder holds the information and which version of which document is current. A note app organizes better, but someone still has to search, open the right note, read it, and decide if it applies. A chat app captures decisions in real time, but search typically returns a list of messages, not an answer, and after a few months the useful information is buried.
AI chatbots that connect to uploaded files can answer questions, but they often do not show which document they read or whether they guessed when the vault had nothing relevant. If the answer is wrong and the tool does not say where it came from, the team has no way to check it or fix the source. The business that uploads a hundred documents and asks a question has no visibility into whether the assistant read the pricing sheet, the old meeting notes, or nothing at all.
Customer records live in a separate system—Relay or TradesBackbone for the businesses Mycel serves—so the tool that holds the business's memory does not need to be the same tool that books appointments or dispatches jobs. What the business needs is a place that captures what it learns, files it so the team can find it, and answers questions from it in a way that shows its work.
How Mycel captures and files what the team learns
Mycel gives each business a shared vault of plain-markdown folders that the team works in, and every person in the business can capture information in four ways: record a voice note, upload a recording or file, type a note, or forward email to the business's own email-in address. Each capture is filed and sorted into cards such as tasks, people, follow-ups and prices, for a person to review.
An HVAC shop owner listens to a vendor pitch on the way to a job site, records a voice note with the pricing and the reason she declined, and Mycel files it as a price card. She reviews it that afternoon, edits the vendor name, and moves it into the vault folder for suppliers. Two months later, a team member types @assistant in the #general channel and asks why the shop does not carry that brand; the assistant answers in the thread, showing it read the supplier folder, and quotes the decision note the owner filed.
A salon manager forwards an email from a client who asked about a new service, and Mycel files it as a follow-up card with the client's name. The manager reviews the card and adds a note about the service price, so the next person who asks the assistant about that service gets the same answer.
The assistant answers from uploaded spreadsheets down to the named file, sheet and row. A landscaping company uploads a pricing sheet for seasonal contracts, and when the owner asks the assistant what the business charges for spring cleanup on a half-acre property, the assistant answers with the figure and cites the file name, the sheet, and the row. The assistant can also turn an answer into a spreadsheet, chart, one-page brief, or slide deck, so the owner who asks for a summary of last quarter's pricing decisions gets a one-page brief pulled from the vault's decision notes.
Every answer shows which vault documents the assistant read, and a reply that read nothing from the vault is marked that way. The assistant can still be wrong, so showing where it looked matters: the person reading the answer can open the source and decide whether to trust it.
How the vault connects with the rest of the business
Mycel pairs with other Martello apps that handle the parts of the business the vault does not: Relay or TradesBackbone for customer records, ReputeLift for reviews, and SynthPrism for posts. A business uses Relay or TradesBackbone, never both. Customer records themselves stay in Relay or TradesBackbone, one click away from Mycel, and the connected apps can file what the business learns into the vault.
Consider a hypothetical pest control company using TradesBackbone. The owner writes the company's service rules once in the vault: re-treatment windows, what each plan covers, which products need a signed notice. TradesBackbone's AI reads only the folders the owner shares with it, so its answers draw on those same rules, while the customer records stay in TradesBackbone.
Relay's and TradesBackbone's AI read only the folders the owner shares with them, and Relay uses those folders when answering customers only after one extra explicit approval by the owner. ReputeLift's AI reads the business vault, and SynthPrism's assistant reads it for brand voice and business facts when drafting posts. The vault is the brain of one stack: see how Mycel works with the connected apps.
Connecting the apps requires a Business plan. The Business plan at $199/month for 3 people ($2,189/year) includes shared vault, team chat, connecting TradesBackbone or Relay plus ReputeLift and SynthPrism, Today, team roles, private folders, document history with restore, automations, and every add-on except Advanced AI models. Each extra seat costs $59/month up to 25 seats, and crew added from TradesBackbone or Relay are free and do not take a seat.
How the team works inside the vault
The vault is a set of plain-markdown folders, and every person in the business with the right role can read, edit, and add documents. A business has four roles: Owner, Admin, Member, and Viewer. A folder can be kept to everyone, to team members but not viewers, or to owners and admins only. Every document keeps a history of who changed what and when, with restore, so if someone edits a price sheet and later realizes the old version was correct, they can restore it. Something the assistant filed can be undone the same way.
Team chat runs inside Mycel's business workspaces, with channels—every business has #general—and direct messages between the people in the business. Typing @assistant in a message gets an answer in the thread from the business vault, and the assistant may offer to file a decision note or add a task, which does nothing until a person approves it. Anything Mycel's assistant would change inside another Martello app waits for an approval first.
An electrical contractor's team works in a channel called #job-notes, and a foreman posts that a particular model of circuit breaker keeps tripping at a job site. The owner replies with the fix and types a note to file the workaround. The assistant offers to file it into the vault's equipment folder, the owner approves it, and the next time another technician hits the same issue, they type @assistant and get the workaround with a citation to the document.
The whole vault exports as markdown at any time. Each exported file carries its created and updated dates and metadata in a frontmatter header, and the export is the current version of each document, not its version history. A business that wants to take its data and leave, or back up the vault outside Mycel, downloads the export and owns a set of plain text files with no proprietary lock.
What Today does and why it matters
Home opens on Today, a list of what is waiting on a person across the connected apps. Each item shows which app it came from, why it surfaced, how long it has waited, and a link straight to it. A roofing company owner opens Mycel in the morning and sees a follow-up card from a voice note she recorded yesterday, a task assigned to her in team chat, a review waiting on a reply in ReputeLift, and a reminder that a TradesBackbone estimate has been waiting on a client for five days.
The link goes straight to the item, and the owner handles it in the app it came from. Today does not replace the other apps; it lists what is waiting on a person across them.
On a Business plan every employee gets their own filtered Today, while cash and approvals stay with the owner and admins.
How a landscaping company might use the vault and the assistant
Consider a hypothetical landscaping company with six crew members, a dispatcher, and an owner. The company handles residential lawn care, seasonal contracts, and one-off projects like fall cleanups and mulch installation. The owner uses Mycel's Business plan, connects TradesBackbone for customer records and scheduling, and gives every person in the company a Member role in the vault.
The owner creates folders in the vault for pricing, equipment, suppliers, crew notes, and seasonal processes. The pricing folder holds a spreadsheet with line-item rates for mowing, edging, aeration, dethatching, and mulch by volume. The equipment folder holds maintenance schedules for the mowers and notes on which models need which parts. The suppliers folder holds vendor contacts, volume discounts, and notes on which supplier carries which brands. The seasonal processes folder holds checklists for spring startup, fall cleanup, and winterizing equipment.
In the first week of fall, a crew lead underquotes an aeration job and records a voice note about it on the drive back. Mycel files it as a follow-up card, and the dispatcher reviews it and files a decision note in the pricing folder with the correct rate.
Two weeks later, another crew member is quoting a similar job and types @assistant in the #general channel to ask what the business charges for aeration on a quarter-acre lot. The assistant reads the pricing folder, answers with the rate from the spreadsheet, cites the file and row, and also surfaces the decision note about the recent underquote. The crew member sees both, quotes the correct rate, and avoids the same mistake.
The owner uploads a new supplier contract with a seasonal discount on mulch and files it in the suppliers folder. When the dispatcher is planning spring jobs, she asks the assistant which supplier has the best mulch pricing, and the assistant reads the suppliers folder and answers with the discount terms and the document name. The dispatcher places the order on those terms.
At the end of the season, the owner asks the assistant to turn the pricing folder into a one-page brief summarizing what changed during the year. The assistant pulls the decision notes, the updated rates, and the supplier changes, and generates a brief the owner reviews with the team in a fall planning meeting. The notes from that meeting are captured in Mycel's Team meetings module—video calls in a Team channel with a live transcript—and filed into the vault as a decision note for next year.
How roles and private folders control what the team sees
A med spa with twelve employees uses Mycel's Business plan and assigns roles to control who sees what. The owner and the manager are Admins, the front desk and the aestheticians are Members, and the part-time social media contractor is a Viewer. The owner creates a folder for employee notes and sets it to owners and admins only, so performance conversations and pay decisions stay private. The pricing folder is open to team members but not viewers, so the aestheticians can check service pricing but the contractor cannot. The brand voice and service descriptions folder is open to everyone, so the contractor can read it when drafting posts in SynthPrism.
The owner and manager discuss a price increase in a direct message, and the assistant offers to file it as a decision note. The owner approves it, and the note goes into the pricing folder, where the aestheticians can read it and the contractor cannot. This setup lets the business share what it learns without flattening the hierarchy or exposing sensitive information. The vault is shared, but not every folder is, and the roles let the owner control access the same way they would control who sees a physical file cabinet.
What approvals control and why they matter
Anything Mycel's assistant would change inside another Martello app waits for an approval first. When the assistant in team chat offers to file a decision note or add a task, the offer does nothing until a person approves it. Approvals sit in one place, the Approvals screen in Mycel's navigation, and cash and approvals stay with the owner and admins on a Business plan.
Not every change in the vault waits for approval: people edit documents directly, and every document keeps a history of who changed what and when, with restore. The approval step is for what the assistant offers to do, so the owner decides what the assistant changes.
How Mycel compares to other approaches
| Approach | What it does well | Where it stops | When to consider it | |----------|-------------------|----------------|---------------------| | Shared drive | Holds files, familiar interface, easy to upload | Does not answer questions, search returns file names not answers, version control is manual | Files the team rarely references | | Note app | Organizes better than a drive, tagging and linking, faster search | Someone still has to search and read, does not connect to customer records or review tools | Solo owner who wants organized notes | | Chat app search | Captures real-time decisions, threaded conversations, team already uses it | Search returns messages not answers, old threads get buried, no connection to other tools | Team that rarely needs to reference the past | | AI chatbot with file upload | Answers questions from uploaded files | Often does not show which document it read or whether it guessed, no team chat, no connection to business tools | Quick experiments, one person testing AI | | Mycel | Shared vault the team works in, assistant shows which documents it read, connects customer records and review tools, team chat with @assistant, Today pulls what is waiting across apps | Young product from a small team, limited to Martello app ecosystem, not a pipeline or contact manager | Trade shops and appointment businesses that want one stack for memory, customers, reviews and posts |
The business that needs only file storage can use a shared drive. The business that wants organized notes and rarely references them can use a note app. The business that wants the team's memory to answer questions, connect with customer records, surface what is waiting, and work inside team chat should look at Mycel's pricing and the stack it connects.
What the Business plan includes and what it costs
The Business plan at $199/month for 3 people ($2,189/year) includes:
- Shared vault of plain-markdown folders with team roles (Owner, Admin, Member, Viewer)
- Team chat with channels, direct messages, and @assistant in threads
- Connecting TradesBackbone or Relay, ReputeLift, and SynthPrism
- Today: a list of what is waiting across connected apps
- Private folders (set to everyone, team members only, or owners and admins only)
- Document history with restore
- Automations
- Every add-on except Advanced AI models ($20/month add-on)
Each extra seat costs $59/month up to 25 seats. Crew added from TradesBackbone or Relay are free and do not take a seat, so a roofing company with three office staff and eight crew members pays for three seats, not eleven. Team meetings—video calls in a Team channel with a live transcript, notes and action items filed into the vault—cost $6 per seat a month and are optional. Enterprise past 25 seats is custom. Annual billing is 12 months for the price of 11.
Personal plans are for one person: Personal at $69/month ($759/year) includes own assistant and vault, 1,800 AI credits a month, email-in, and add-ons a la carte. Personal Plus at $119/month ($1,309/year) includes everything in Personal plus every add-on and 1,200 more AI credits a month. Free is $0 for one person with vault, filing and search, and 50 AI credits a month. Team roles, private folders, and team chat belong to a Business plan; Personal and Personal Plus are for solo owners.
The business sets up and runs the stack itself, starting free. Check the current details at https://usemycel.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Mycel do that a shared drive or note app does not?
Mycel captures what the business learns—voice notes, uploaded files, typed notes, forwarded email—and files it into a shared vault of plain-markdown folders that an assistant answers from, showing which documents it read for each reply. A shared drive holds files but does not answer questions, and a note app organizes but still requires someone to search, read, and decide if the information applies.
Does Mycel replace customer records or a scheduling system?
No. Customer records stay in Relay or TradesBackbone, which handle conversations, booking, jobs and estimates. Mycel holds the business's memory—pricing, decisions, processes, vendor notes—and Relay's or TradesBackbone's AI reads the folders the owner shares with it.
How does the assistant show where it got an answer?
Every answer shows which vault documents the assistant read, and a reply that read nothing from the vault is marked that way. When answering from an uploaded spreadsheet, the assistant cites the file name, sheet, and row. When the vault has nothing relevant, the reply is marked as having read nothing from the vault, and the person reading the answer can open the source documents to check them.
Can the team chat inside Mycel or does it require another app?
Team chat runs inside Mycel's business workspaces, with channels—every business starts with #general—and direct messages between people in the business. Typing @assistant in a message gets an answer in the thread from the business vault, and the assistant may offer to file a decision note or add a task, which does nothing until a person approves it.
What happens to the vault if the business stops using Mycel?
The whole vault exports as markdown at any time. Each exported file carries its created and updated dates and metadata in a frontmatter header, and the export is the current version of each document, not its version history. The business owns the files and can take them anywhere.
Do all team members see everything in the vault?
A business has four roles—Owner, Admin, Member, and Viewer—and a folder can be kept to everyone, to team members but not viewers, or to owners and admins only. Every document keeps a history of who changed what and when, with restore, so the owner controls who sees sensitive information like employee notes or financial decisions while still sharing pricing, processes, and supplier notes with the team.
A trade shop or appointment business that loses what it learns when a person quits, forgets, or takes time off can capture that knowledge in a shared vault, ask an assistant that shows its work, and connect the vault with customer records, reviews, and posts so the business runs from one memory instead of a dozen scattered places. Mycel and the Martello apps it connects are built for that, and the business runs them itself.