Deploy and Host Construction AI Employee on Railway

An AI employee for residential contractors. Connects to Gmail and Google Drive, answers project questions with cited sources, transcribes voice notes from the truck, and proactively flags emails that need attention — all through Telegram. Runs on a ~$5/month Railway service. Built on Hermes Agent.

About Hosting Construction AI Employee

The Construction AI Employee runs as an always-on Railway service. One Dockerfile installs Hermes Agent, code-server (browser-based VS Code), and all dependencies. On first boot, the entrypoint installs the construction-agent profile — including construction domain knowledge, five specialized skills for email processing, data mapping, Gmail and Drive search, and proactive inbox flagging — plus a structured Context OS that organizes every project, email, decision, invoice, and spec sheet. You paste four API keys into Railway's Variables form, click Deploy, and two minutes later your agent is alive on Telegram. No terminal, no code, no config files.

Common Use Cases

Ask project questions with cited sources ("What tile did we spec for the master bath?")
Voice-dump site visits into Telegram — agent transcribes and files everything by project
Proactive inbox scanning every 15 minutes for unanswered emails from subs and clients
Cross-project search ("Show me all unpaid invoices across all jobs")
Onboarding data mapping — agent discovers where your business data lives

Dependencies for Construction AI Employee Hosting

OpenRouter account (Claude Sonnet 4, ~$15-20/month in credits)
Groq account (voice transcription, free tier)
Telegram bot (created in 60 seconds via @BotFather)
Google Cloud project with Gmail and Drive APIs enabled (optional, for email access)

Deployment Dependencies

OpenRouter API key: https://openrouter.ai/keys
Groq API key: https://console.groq.com/keys
Telegram bot setup: message @BotFather on Telegram
Source code: https://github.com/afinnegan67/construction-agent

Why Deploy Construction AI Employee on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Construction AI Employee on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.