How to Automate Basecamp

Basecamp keeps a project's talk, to-dos and files on one page

Basecamp, made by 37signals and rebuilt as Basecamp 5 for 2026, puts each project on one page: a Message Board for announcements, To-dos with assignees and due dates, Card Tables for work moving through stages, Docs & Files, a Calendar and Campfire for chat. Plans are priced by the number of active projects, from $25 a month for three to $299 a month, billed annually, for unlimited, with no per-user fees, so inviting a client's team does not raise the bill.

Client mode decides, project by project, what a client can see. Automatic Check-ins ask the team the same question on a schedule, such as what everyone is working on this week, every Monday at 9am, and keep the answers in one thread.

At the top of a project, the Needle shows the status its people last chose: On track, Some risk or Concerned. Hill Charts show which pieces of the work are still being figured out and which are moving on a clear plan.

A Monday status round means opening every project in turn

A project lead who wants to know how things stand opens each project, scans the to-dos for red dates, reads the latest on the Message Board and checks whether the Needle moved, then does the same for the next one. Across the ten projects a Studio plan allows, that takes most of Monday morning.

Check-ins create their own chasing. Most people answer, and the project lead notices on Thursday that two designers have written nothing since last week. The account manager rewrites the week's progress as an email because the client never logs in, and the operations lead copies new deadlines into a calendar by hand. A card can stay in one Card Table column for a fortnight without a comment, because nobody opened that project.

Basecamp's Reports show what is late only to whoever opens them

Automatic Check-ins ask their question on schedule without anyone sending a reminder. Reports gather work across projects, such as Overdue to-dos grouped by how late they are and Mission Control, which shows every project's Needle together. Email Forwards pull a conversation into a project through [email protected] or the project's own address, and Timesheet exports logged time as a CSV.

Basecamp 5 is also ready for AI agents. Its CLI connects Claude, Codex or a similar tool to the account to post messages, create and assign to-dos, reply to check-ins and pull project activity, and setting it up takes a terminal and a subscription to an AI service.

Reports are pages someone opens, and Basecamp's help describes no way to email one or send it on a schedule, so the overdue list never reaches a client who reads only email, or the calendar that should hold the deadlines. The Needle and the Hill Chart dots move only when a person moves them. Basecamp's help also warns that auto-forwarding email into a project may work but can break easily.

A line per project in Notion shows which ones slipped

Instead of the Monday round, the project lead could read one health table in Notion, a line per project: its overdue to-dos, the Needle's current setting, and whether its Message Board has gone two weeks without a post. In that line the lead also sees any scope that has stayed on the uphill side of its Hill Chart since the last review, which means the team is still working out how to do it.

The people who skipped yesterday's Automatic Check-in could get a nudge in Slack before lunch, and the whole team could have everything due today or overdue on WhatsApp, next to the newest check-in answers. The operations lead would stop copying deadlines, because each new one is already on Google Calendar.

For client work, the account manager could edit and send a plain email drafted from the week's finished to-dos, instead of writing it from nothing.

The Monday round runs on a schedule, with the Needle left to people

For a team willing to run it from a terminal with an AI subscription, Basecamp's CLI can hand this round to Claude or Codex. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you, so the same round needs no terminal. Each Monday it opens every project its account belongs to, reads the to-dos, the Needle, the Hill Charts and the check-in answers, and sends the summary where the team reads it.

It reports and reminds without changing the work: it completes no to-dos, and it leaves the Needle and the Hill Chart dots to the people on the project. Each card below takes one of these jobs: chasing check-ins, the Monday health report or the daily to-do digest.