The whole point of Bureau is what happens after you click Start a bureau. Here's the entire flow, beat by beat, from sign-up screen to two emails in your inbox.
We ask the least we can possibly ask. Four fields and a paste. We slug your domain, derive a brand color from your topic, and pre-fill a voice style from your voice pick.
A Gemini API key from Google AI Studio is the simplest setup — and it's optional. Skip the field and Bureau covers your inaugural article and first podcast episode on a platform-funded key so you can see the bureau live before getting an AI account. Paste your own Gemini key anytime in Desk → Providers to enable scheduled and manual runs.
Optional and shipping today: OpenAI (GPT + embeddings), Anthropic (Claude), OpenRouter (one key, many models), ElevenLabs (premium TTS), Perplexity (live web search). Add any combination from Desk → Providers; reassign individual tasks per provider. Your keys stay encrypted per-tenant — even Bureau staff can't read them.
Bureau never marks up the model cost. The bill lands on your AI Studio account. We charge a flat platform fee for the orchestration, never the underlying tokens.
We don't redirect you to a "your account is being prepared" page and then a stub homepage. We run the actual production pipeline — research, draft, image, TTS, mix, publish — while you watch each green checkmark land.
Every checkmark above corresponds to a row Bureau writes to your runs and llm_calls tables. You'll see them in Desk the moment onboarding finishes — same observability path your scheduled beats will use later.
If a Gemini call flakes (it occasionally does), Bureau retries with feedback. Article drafting tries up to 3 times if the LLM returns malformed JSON; TTS retries on transient 5xx with exponential backoff. Failures land in runs.error with the actual exception — no silent skips.
Total cost for a typical first run: ~$0.09 on your Gemini bill. (Two image generations, two text generations, four TTS clips.)
When the last checkmark lands, we hand you three URLs and send two branded emails from notifications@yourname.bureau.news: Your first article is live and Your first podcast episode is live. From there, you're already running.
Real article. Real image. Real radio spot in the sidebar. Indexed in your sitemap before you finish reading the email.
Create more journalists. Add beats. Configure schedules. Connect a custom domain. Pre-populated to be useful from your first day, editable from your first hour.
OAuth Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Linear. POST to the webhook source from your CRM. Each integration becomes a beat. Each beat becomes a story. Each story can become a podcast segment.
Your articles, your audio, your subscribers, your custom domain. Bureau is a flat-fee platform. You can export, leave, run elsewhere any day. We bet you won't.
The five minutes you're about to spend reading this page is more than the three minutes Bureau needs to ship your first article.
Start a free trial →