b-tec // OSP RESEARCH
Your storage business shouldn't be a tenant of its own software.
b-tec is researching and building OSP, the Open Storage Platform: an owner-controlled, agent-native alternative to rented storage-management SaaS. Self-storage is the proving ground. The problem it solves is not limited to self-storage.
The category is overdue for a reset.
Storage-management software became critical infrastructure for thousands of operators, and then quietly became a landlord over that infrastructure. Per-unit SaaS pricing, closed data, and structural lock-in were never inevitable. They were a business model choice, made at a time when there was no practical alternative.
Five ways the current model works against you.
The Per-Unit Tax
Pricing scales with unit count, not with value delivered. Grow the business and the software gets a bigger cut of it, every month, forever.
Closed by Design
Data access, integrations, and automation are gated behind what the vendor decides to expose. The operator rents visibility into their own operation.
You Absorb Their Roadmap
Price increases, feature changes, acquisitions, and end-of-life decisions land on the operator with no vote and no recourse.
Switching Is the Punishment
Migration friction is not an accident. Lock-in is part of the business model, and everyone building it knows that.
Built for Clicking, Not for Agents
Most platforms assume a human clicking through screens. Businesses are increasingly run through APIs, automation, and AI agents. The category has not caught up.
This didn't start as a startup idea.
For decades, b-tec has supported storage businesses and the legacy management systems they depend on. We've worked with the software companies, lived through their limitations, built around their closed systems, and helped clients absorb the consequences: rising fees, forced changes, weak interoperability, and technology aging in place because switching cost too much.
We kept waiting for a genuinely better option. It never arrived.
So we're building one: modern storage management software that businesses can own, understand, extend, and leave with, the way critical infrastructure should work.
AI-assisted engineering changed the economics.
Giving every client an isolated, portable instance used to be an operational cost a small technology company couldn't sustain. That is no longer true. AI-assisted engineering makes it economically practical for a small, experienced team to maintain a secure upstream platform while each client runs a fully separate, exportable system of their own. This is not a UI refresh with a chatbot bolted on. It changes what the ownership model can look like.
Ownable. Portable. Isolated. Agent-first.
Isolated
Each client runs its own instance and its own database. No shared multi-tenant blob holding your data next to a competitor’s.
Portable
Hosted clients get a contractual path to leave, with the repo and a complete database export. Ownership means being able to walk.
Yours, Financially
The client always owns its Stripe account. Money moves through the client’s infrastructure, not ours.
Agent-Native
The human UI, the REST API, and MCP/AI agents all run through the same service layer. Nothing is a second-class integration bolted on later.
Governed Autonomy
Agent actions carry server-enforced permissions, approval gates, idempotency, and audit trails. Automation without a paper trail is not a feature.
Disciplined engineering, not promises.
The current build covers move-in and move-out workflows, lease and signature handling, Stripe payments and webhooks, and receipts. It has gone through multiple rounds of internal review and adversarial red-team analysis by separate engineering passes. Here is what has actually been built and tested:
- •Unit inventory and status board: full CRUD, search, and real-time availability across every facility
- •Tenant records and lease lifecycle: move-in and move-out run as resumable, auditable workflows, not simple status flags
- •Stripe card payments and manually recorded cash/check, both driven by a dedicated payment state machine so a failed or disputed charge never corrupts the books
- •Automated recurring billing: nightly rent charges, late fees, and prorated move-ins and move-outs
- •Append-only financial ledger, reconciled to the penny, with balances always computed and never stored
- •Delinquency tracking and end-of-day, occupancy, and receivables reporting, available through the API as well as the UI
- •Append-only audit log on every state change, human or agent-initiated, recording actor, action, and before/after values
- •Agent-native by design: every operation above is exposed as both a REST API and an MCP tool, so an AI agent runs the business through the identical service layer a staff member uses, not a bolted-on integration
- •Security enforced at the database, not just the app: row-level tenant isolation, idempotency keys on every money-moving action, and approval gates that route anything above a configurable threshold to a human review queue, even when an agent initiated it
The map below lays out how this was built end to end, from product definition through incremental milestone development, adversarial red teaming, release validation, and the assurance evidence produced along the way. We're sharing it publicly so anyone evaluating OSP, or evaluating custom software development in general, can see the discipline behind the process.
07 / STATUS
Private beta in active development.
No firm date yet, and we'd rather tell you that plainly than put up a countdown we can't stand behind.
Help shape the alternative.
We're inviting a small number of storage operators who believe their software should work for them, not own them. If that's you, tell us about your operation and we'll follow up as the private beta opens.
Request Private Beta Access