Why Seneschal Stays Small

In April I built a small broker so an AI agent could work with my Google account without holding it. Seneschal sits between the agent and Gmail, Calendar and Drive. The agent asks, I tap approve, then it acts. The agent never gets the keys - the tokens sit with Seneschal, and every send or write waits on my thumb.

It runs my real inbox, in production, every day. The code is open source.

The obvious next question is whether other people can just use mine. "Run it yourself" is a README. "Use mine" is a sentence Google has opinions about.

The wall

Google sorts OAuth scopes into tiers. Sending mail on your behalf or managing your calendar is Sensitive: Google reviews the app, wants a privacy policy and a demo video, and lets you through.

Reading your inbox, or your Drive, is Restricted. Seneschal asks for three of those - it reads mail, reads Drive, writes to Drive. Each one opt-in, but they're the product. A broker that can't read anything is just catching dust (with technology, though).

Restricted means Google's review plus a security assessment by an authorized lab (CASA, in Google's alphabet), whenever that data is stored or passes through your servers. A broker keeps the tokens on its server. That's the point of a broker.

The cash is not the scary part. The lab Google recommends charges $675 for the basic assessment. Call it six, seven hundred dollars.

Then comes the time. A scan of the live deployment, fixing whatever it finds, a questionnaire of fifty-odd questions where every answer wants a justification. Google's own review on top. A privacy policy that has to match what the code actually does. About a month if it goes well, and the assessment comes back every year.

Open source doesn't buy you a pass, either. They probe the running server, not the README.

And on the other side, you're holding strangers' inboxes. GDPR and its ilk have no "too small to count" clauses (I looked, hopeful).

Testing, on purpose

Until you climb it, Google gives you Testing. Up to a hundred users, added by hand, counted over the life of the project - remove someone and the slot does not come back. Everyone clicks through a "Google hasn't verified this app" screen. Every approval expires after seven days, so you log in again weekly.

That's where Seneschal lives. The code is public, run it yourself. If you're seriously interested, I'll add you to my instance by hand. Building in the open, with reserved seating.

Is the climb worth it? Not yet. Six hundred dollars is not what stops me (it doesn't help, though). It's signing up for the process every year, for a product in a space where the big labs are already wiring Gmail straight into their own assistants. Most people aren't as security conscious as me, and those who are more paranoid will just host their own.

If the open source took off - people knocking, people running it, people asking for the hosted version - the math flips, and I'd make the investment gladly. The wall isn't going anywhere. It'll be there when there's a reason to climb it.

If you're building on Workspace

Find out which tier you're in before you announce anything. Read your scope list like an invoice: one Restricted scope and the whole app is Restricted.

Sometimes the answer is narrower scopes and a product that still works. Sometimes Testing is the product. Sometimes you pay the lab and spend the month. Working out which one, before you've spent the month, is a good chunk of what I do for teams.

Seneschal stays small, on purpose. If you want in, knock.