One person, an entire C-Suite.
You're the marketing team, the sales team, the ops team, and the on-call CTO. Every advisor tells you the same thing: "you need to hire." But you can't — not at the rates a real CMO or VP Sales charges, and not before you have revenue to justify the burn.
Merkava lets you hire a department instead, each one run by its own AI exec. Marketing runs your content and outreach. Sales qualifies every deal. Operations keeps the company cadence. Engineering reviews your stack and tells you honestly when a non-Merkava tool is better. $699/mo for the whole C-Suite. One operator, real org chart, no raise required.
Solo doesn't mean stitched. When you hire Marketing, you get a CMO and the specialists who run the work — Beacon (SEO), Quillsly (content), Nitrous (ads), and Webster (web). They operate those tools for you, unified in one cockpit on a shared data layer. You replace Surfer, Buffer, and Webflow — and the headcount that would have run them alone.
Context-switching isn't "productivity" — it's overhead.
- Eight logins before coffee. Analytics, search console, social schedulers, email, CRM, ads manager, helpdesk, invoicing. Every morning starts with the same ritual.
- Reports you write for yourself. The weekly "how's it going" review is a spreadsheet you maintain because no one tool knows your whole business.
- Work that stays in your head. The fix you know you should ship this week exists as a Slack star, a Notion bullet, and a sticky note. Three places, one forgotten detail.
- Tools priced for teams. Per-seat pricing punishes the solo operator. You're paying enterprise rates for a company of one.
Two Drives at first. Add as the business asks.
Start here. These four carry the most weight for a solo operator and compose well under Merkava Core (Prospector + Beacon are built in — you get them either way).
I stopped paying for four tools the week Merkava shipped. My morning routine is open one tab, see what matters, ship. It's the first BI tool built for how I actually work.
Founder, Harbor & Rye · solo operator, 2 SaaS products
$79 / mo
Built for the company of one.
Merkava's first wave prioritizes solo operators and small teams. Waitlist gets founding-price access and input on the Merkava primitives.
How Merkava compares.
FAQ.
Is Merkava a CRM?
Merkava is Merkava — it includes a CRM. Prospector is the sales Drive — deals, pipeline, contacts, clients, quick-action activity logs. It is one of four Drives shipped in the Merkava core (Portfolio, Signals, Prospector, Crew), so you do not install it separately.
How does Merkava compare to HubSpot for a solo operator?
HubSpot is sales-first and priced per seat — you pay even when there's only one of you. Merkava is operator-first and priced per department. Hire one department from $99/mo (Engineering) or the whole C-Suite for $699/mo — each department is the AI exec plus their specialist Drives, not a per-seat tier. For a solo operator who'd otherwise hire a fractional CMO, COO, or CTO, this replaces a $25-50K/mo bench at a price you can run on day one. The tools are the cheapest part of what you're getting.
Can I connect my own AI key?
Yes. Bring your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Perplexity API key (BYOK). You get 15% off your Merkava Core subscription. Your token is used only for forward inference — never used to write to your tenant data. Details in the BYOK scope spec.
What do I actually get when I hire my first department?
Hiring a department includes the C2 operating playbook, Forge inference, the Merkava core (Portfolio, Signals, Prospector, Crew), and the department's AI exec plus their specialist Drives at the bundled tier price. Sales at $199/mo is your VP Sales running Prospector, OODA, and Signals. Marketing at $249/mo is your CMO running 7 specialists including Beacon, Quillsly, Nitrous, Webster, Affiliation, Freeform, Manifest. Operations at $199/mo is your COO running 7 ops specialists. Engineering at $99/mo is your CTO running honest stack reviews. Or hire the whole C-Suite for $699/mo.
What happens if I grow past one venture?
There's no fixed venture cap on the core surface — most operators run several ventures from one workspace comfortably. Department and Drive subscriptions are per-tenant, not per-venture, so adding a second business doesn't multiply your bill. Studios running 30+ ventures: email hi@withmerkava.com to scope a custom configuration.