# Bother > Bother makes organizational context machine-readable through a semantic graph model. It captures concepts like decisions, risks, goals, dependencies, and reasoning that drive projects -- context that typically lives in people's heads, chat threads, or scattered documents. Website: https://bother.now ## Problem Most organizational context -- strategy, rationale, dependencies, who is doing what and why -- is not documented anywhere. Organizations compensate by paying people to be context infrastructure: gathering, synthesizing, and routing information through meetings, status updates, and "loop me in" chains. This is information logistics, not knowledge work. Existing tools model work as pages (Notion), tickets (Jira, Linear), or tasks (Asana), and communication as chat streams (Slack, Teams). None of them structurally represent the context layer: why decisions were made, which risks threaten which goals, what depends on what and why. That context lives in people's heads and leaves when they do. ## What Bother Is A project workspace built on a polymorphic graph model with typed nodes and semantically validated edges. ### Data Model - **9 node archetypes**: task, bundle, goal, person, team, issue, decision, resource, risk - **9 edge types**: contains, precedes, uses, evaluates, impacts, mitigates, achieves, involves, relates - Each edge type has directional semantic constraints on which archetype pairs are valid - "achieves" only connects work archetypes to goals - "impacts" is sourced only from risks and issues, and reaches the work they threaten or the risk they feed - "mitigates" only connects work to the risks it addresses - "evaluates" only connects decisions to options being scored - "precedes" represents blocking temporal dependencies - "uses" represents non-blocking resource utilization - "contains" enforces parent-child hierarchy - "involves" assigns people and teams to work with role metadata - "relates" is the weak lateral fallback for associations no specific edge type carries -- constrained per archetype pair like every other type, and most of its valid pairs join a resource to the work that references it ### Key Capabilities - Decisions are first-class objects with structured evaluation: options scored against criteria in a decision matrix, with rationale preserved as connected structure - Risks have probability, impact, and status -- connected to the goals and work they threaten via typed "impacts" edges, with mitigations tracked via "mitigates" edges - Dependencies are typed: "precedes" (blocking temporal) vs "uses" (non-blocking reference) vs "relates" (contextual association) - Discussion is anchored to the work itself -- comments live on nodes, not in separate chat channels, so rationale stays attached to the decision or task it shaped ### Interaction Modes Bother has one home view, with context carried on every item. **Your work** -- the action queue and home view. Each team member lands on a prioritized queue of their directly actionable work: tasks to complete, issues to resolve, decisions to make. Not an aggregation of everything in the workspace -- a filtered view of what needs attention next. **The item card** -- the context view, opened from any item reference: the queue, search, agent receipts, and links in agent replies all open the same expanded card. It shows the item's full content plus every connection grouped by relationship meaning (what blocks it, what it serves, who is involved), with at-a-glance counts per group. Opening a connected item re-points the card onto it, with a back stack. Navigation is by following connections -- you move through the graph by exploring relationships, not by searching or browsing a page tree. ### AI Agent An integrated AI agent reads the graph and proposes changes through conversation. Describe a new risk and it proposes creating a risk node, connecting it to the goals it threatens via "impacts" edges, and linking potential mitigations. By default changes apply automatically with a named receipt and one-tap undo; users can switch to reviewing and approving each proposal instead. The graph stays current as a byproduct of conversation, not manual maintenance. The agent is contextual -- it knows what the user is looking at in the graph and reasons about the surrounding structure. It proposes connections the user hasn't drawn, surfaces stale dependencies, and flags unmitigated risks. While the user narrates their work it absorbs updates silently -- statements become receipted, reversible graph updates, and questions always get an answer. Every write is grounded in the user's own words. ### Quality Standards - The AI agent operates under anti-slop quality standards: proposals must trace to the user's actual words and context, not generic templates - Pre-flight validation checks all AI proposals before showing them to users (schema validation, spatial scope, graph physics, database pre-checks) - All graph writes trace to the user's own words and are reversible -- surfaced as review cards or receipted auto-applied changes with undo; the AI never modifies the graph autonomously ## Who It Is For - Teams where "why did we make this decision?" is a frequent, expensive question - Projects where context loss during handoffs or departures causes rework - Organizations where status meetings exist primarily to reconstruct information the tools should already hold - Technical and product teams managing complex, cross-functional work with many dependencies - Teams that spend more time routing context than doing creative work ## Pricing One price per workspace, with unlimited members on every plan. Plans differ only in how many messages the workspace sends the agent each month, pooled across everyone; nothing is priced by the head. Items, connections and discussion stay open on every plan, always. - Free: the first 50 messages to the agent and 50 live items, once, per workspace - Starter: $24 a month or $240 a year, 200 messages a month - Pro: $99 a month or $990 a year, 1,000 messages a month - Scale: $299 a month or $2,990 a year, 3,000 messages a month - Enterprise: talk to us; the allowance and the terms are agreed by contract Prices are also set in GBP and EUR; other currencies convert at checkout. VAT or sales tax is added where it applies. Sold through Link, a Stripe company acting as merchant of record. A new subscription can be refunded in full within 14 days of its first payment. Details: https://bother.now/pricing ## Links - [Vision](https://bother.now/vision): Project management as context routing - [Pricing](https://bother.now/pricing): One price per workspace, unlimited members, plans by monthly agent messages - [Bother vs Notion](https://bother.now/compare/notion): Why document-centric tools fail to connect context - [Bother vs Linear](https://bother.now/compare/linear): Why issue trackers lose context when people leave - [Bother vs Jira](https://bother.now/compare/jira): Why ticket models miss the reasoning behind work - [Bother vs Asana](https://bother.now/compare/asana): Why task-centric tools cannot model decisions, risks, or dependencies - [Bother vs Slack / Teams](https://bother.now/compare/slack-teams): Why chat streams bury the context that drives decisions - [Contact](https://bother.now/contact)