Forge
Personal automation tool by Justin Wiebelhaus
Forge is a private, self-hosted assistant that helps me run my own life and small businesses. It connects my Google account, my Notion workspace, my home automation, and a set of custom scripts so I can capture ideas, triage email, manage my calendar, keep my contacts in order, and run the back end of my creator channels. It is built for one person (me) and is not offered to anyone else.
What Forge is
Forge is a personal productivity and automation system that I have been building over the last two years to consolidate the tools I use every day. It runs on my own server hardware at my home. It does not have public sign-up, paying customers, or any other users. The Google account that connects to it is mine. Any data Forge reads from Google belongs to me.
What Forge does with my Google account
Forge requests a focused set of Google API scopes so it can act as a useful assistant across my inbox, calendar, contacts, and the YouTube channels I run for my own creator brands. Each capability below maps to a specific scope listed in the privacy policy.
Gmail
- Read incoming mail to summarize, classify, and prioritize it
- Draft replies for me to review
- Send mail when I have approved a draft
- Apply labels, archive low-priority messages, and move items to trash on request
- Create and manage filters and a vacation responder so my inbox stays sorted
- Help me unsubscribe from mailing lists I no longer want
Google Calendar
- Read my events so the assistant can describe my schedule
- Create, edit, and (on explicit request) delete events
- Find free time across my calendar when I am planning meetings
Google Contacts
- Read my contacts so the assistant knows who people are when they email me
- Read "other contacts" (people I have emailed but not added) for the same purpose
- Add, update, or merge contacts on my request
YouTube (my own creator channels)
- Read and update video metadata: titles, descriptions, tags, thumbnails, captions
- Upload new videos as private or unlisted drafts for me to publish manually
- Read and moderate comments on my own videos
- Read channel analytics so the assistant can give me weekly performance reports
Google Drive
- Create new Docs, Sheets, and other files that Forge itself authors (notes, reports, summaries) and save them to my Drive
- Read and update only the files Forge created (Forge does not have access to my other Drive files)
Google Tasks
- Read and write items in my Google Tasks lists when I want simple task capture from outside of Notion
How Forge runs
- Self-hosted Runs on hardware I own, located in my home in Austin, Texas.
- Single user Only I have access. There is no public sign-up, no team accounts, no shared instance.
- No third parties Forge does not sell, share, or expose my Google data to any third party. Processing happens locally; large language model requests go to my own Anthropic account.
- User-controlled I can revoke Forge's Google access at any time via Google Account permissions.
Contact and links
- Privacy policy: app.justinwiebelhaus.com/privacy
- Email: justin@justinwieb.com
- Operator: Justin Wiebelhaus, Austin, Texas, USA