Answered by hand, at all hours
Customers message late at night and all at once. A reply that comes the next morning is usually a sale that went to another page.
AI startup · Founded 2025
AI that sells for Bangladesh’s online shops.
Byte Minus builds Sells Pilot, an AI sales assistant that answers Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp customers in Bangla, Banglish and English, quotes only the prices and stock a shop really has, and turns chats into confirmed orders.
Live today · free plan for 100 conversations a month · no card needed
Rima AkterMessenger · Dhanmondi
Live
এই কুর্তাটা আছে? দাম কত?“Is this kurta available? How much?”
জি আছে। সুতির কুর্তা — ১,২৫০ টাকা। M, L, XL সাইজ আছে।✓ Checked against catalog · ৳1,250 · 8 in stock
Dhanmondi te delivery koto? Cash e dibo.“Delivery to Dhanmondi? I’ll pay cash.”
Dhanmondi-te delivery 60 taka. Total 1,310 taka, cash on delivery. Confirm korbo?
✓ Order confirmed
- Total
- ৳1,310
- Payment
- Cash on delivery
- Stock
- 8 → 7
- Founded
- 2025
- Channels: Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp
- 3
- Languages: Bangla, Banglish, English
- 3
- Prices sent without a database check
- 0
The problem
Bangladesh sells in the inbox — and the inbox doesn’t scale.
A large share of online selling in Bangladesh happens in Facebook and Instagram chats, known as f-commerce. Every order starts as a message that someone has to answer by hand.
Prices and stock from memory
Whoever is answering quotes from memory or a spreadsheet. One wrong price or a size that has already sold out becomes an argument, a refund or a lost customer.
Orders scattered across chats
Delivery charges, cash on delivery, couriers and returns are worked out message by message, then copied into a notebook or a sheet.
Our product
Sells Pilot: an AI sales assistant for every shop’s inbox.
A merchant connects a Facebook Page, brings their catalog, and the inbox starts answering — with no integration project, developer account or Meta verification to start.
- Live
- SaaS
- Commerce · AI
Answers, quotes, confirms and books the delivery — then hands over when a person is needed.
- Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp in one inbox, on Meta’s official Graph API and WhatsApp Cloud API only.
- Bangla, Banglish and English, often in the same message. The catalog is searchable in all three.
- Orders, not just replies. Carts, cash-on-delivery orders, delivery charges by district, coupons, returns and stock that updates atomically.
- A free shop website for every merchant, selling from the same catalog and stock.
- Couriers and payments: parcels booked with Steadfast, Pathao or RedX; plans paid in taka through bKash and SSLCommerz.
- Works where the team is: a phone app with push notifications, Telegram alerts, and sync with WooCommerce, Shopify and a merchant API.
- Status
- Live, self-serve sign-up
- Free
- 100 conversations / month
- Starter
- ৳1,500 / month · 1,000 conversations
- Growth
- ৳4,500 / month · 5,000 conversations
- Business model
- Prepaid SaaS, priced per conversation
- Website
- sellspilot.com
Connect a Page
One click with Facebook. No Meta dashboard, developer account or webhook to configure.
Bring the catalog
Upload a spreadsheet, add products by hand, or sync an existing WooCommerce or Shopify shop.
It starts selling
It answers, quotes, confirms and books the delivery fee, and hands the conversation over the moment a person is needed.
Why it’s safe to let AI sell
The assistant is allowed to be wrong. The message is not.
Any language model will eventually invent a number. So no draft is trusted: every outgoing message passes gates written in code, not in a prompt, before it can reach a customer.
When the AI isn’t sure — or no AI key is configured at all — the conversation goes to a person. A customer is never left unanswered, and a guess is never sent.
- Price and stock gate — any figure the catalog doesn’t support is blocked; the draft is rewritten or handed over.
- Messaging-window gate — nothing is sent outside Meta’s 24-hour window without an approved template.
- Budget gates — per-conversation message caps and plan quotas, enforced before every send.
- Exactly-once orders — webhooks are signed, queued and de-duplicated; orders and messages carry idempotency keys.
- Every shop kept apart — tenant scoping that fails loudly when no shop is set, and tokens encrypted at rest.
Technology
Built on leading AI models and cloud infrastructure.
Sells Pilot is provider-agnostic by design, so each task runs on the model that does it best, and the platform can scale from one shop to thousands.
Language models
Customer conversations run on Anthropic’s Claude by default. Google Gemini handles images, and OpenAI models handle speech-to-text for voice notes and embeddings for search. The same layer supports Vertex AI, Amazon Bedrock and Azure.
Retrieval and tools
The assistant works through tools — catalog search, the shop’s own answers, order status — backed by PostgreSQL with pgvector and trigram search that understands Bangla, Banglish and English spellings.
Cloud
Runs on AWS in Mumbai (ap-south-1), in Docker, with continuous deployment from GitHub. Our websites are served from Cloudflare’s edge. Next: managed PostgreSQL on RDS and more application servers.
Engineering
Laravel 13 on PHP 8.3, Redis queues, and a test suite that runs against real PostgreSQL and Redis. An architecture test keeps business logic independent of any one channel.
Roadmap
Where Sells Pilot goes next.
Live now
Messenger and Instagram answered by the same assistant, WhatsApp on the Cloud API, a free shop website per merchant, couriers, and a phone app.
Next
Self-serve WhatsApp connection and delivery-status tracking, and Nagad alongside bKash and SSLCommerz.
Then
Fake-order risk scoring before a parcel ships, and a managed, multi-server cloud setup for more merchants.
Beyond commerce
EduByte, our platform for schools, moves from development to pilots with institutions in Bangladesh.
More from Byte Minus
Other products we build and run.
- In development
- Education
EduByte
The school operating platform for Bangladesh.
Attendance, marks, fees, notices and guardian communication, Bangla-first and offline-capable, with every school kept apart by PostgreSQL row-level security.
Visit EduByte → DetailsMIT licensed
- Live
- Shared living
MessLedger
Mess accounts, minus the arguing.
Shared-mess accounting for hostels and flats: meals down to the half meal, bazar, rent, bills and deposits, with the meal rate worked out at month end.
- Live
- Personal finance
MoneyMate
An offline budget tracker that keeps your data on your phone.
Sorts spending into accounts and bills and shows the month at a glance. No ads, no tracking, nothing sold on.
Google Play →Free · Android
- Beta
- Higher education
Grad Ops
The cold email, aimed properly.
Matches a graduate-school applicant’s research interests with professors publishing in that area, so each email reaches the right person.
For MS and PhD applicants
Open source
We share what we build.
Parts of our work that are useful beyond our own products are released under the MIT license, with documentation and tests.
- MIT
- Released
- Payments
BDPayGate
Every Bangladeshi payment gateway, one API — for Laravel and Node.js.
bKash, Nagad, SSLCommerz and nine more behind the same charge, callback, sync and refund, with every payment confirmed server to server.
- MIT
- Released
- Blogging · AI
Laravel AI Blog
The AI-native blog package for Laravel.
On-page SEO scores with plain-English fixes, internal links, AI drafting through laravel/ai, and an MCP server so Claude and ChatGPT can write drafts.
- MIT
- Released
- Go
Go packages for SaaS
Eleven small modules for the parts every SaaS backend needs.
Tenancy with row-level security, permissions, approvals, audit logs, settings, feature flags, translations, media, notifications, backups and an admin panel. Go 1.26+, PostgreSQL through pgx.
- MIT
- Source release in progress
EduByte
Open-source school platform.
Laravel 12, Next.js 15 and PostgreSQL 16, built to be audited and run by the institutions that depend on it.
Company
A small team building AI software for Bangladesh.
Byte Minus was founded in 2025 to build software that Bangladeshi businesses and institutions can rely on — in their language, on their payment rails, and on the connections they actually have.
We work only on our own products and open source, and we keep them small on purpose: fewer moving parts, verified rather than assumed, and tested properly. There are eight bits in a byte; we ship seven.
- Founded
- 2025
- Focus
- AI software for commerce and education in Bangladesh
- Flagship
- Sells Pilot (live)
- Business model
- SaaS subscriptions, prepaid in taka
- Open source
- github.com/byteminus
- Follow us
- Contact
- contact@byteminus.com
From the blog
Engineering notes.
Write-ups from building Sells Pilot, EduByte and our open-source packages.
Eleven open-source Go packages for SaaS backends
Tenancy, permissions, approvals, audit logs, settings, feature flags, translations, media, notifications, backups and an admin panel, as MIT-licensed Go modules.
BDPayGate: one Laravel API for every Bangladeshi payment gateway
BDPayGate is our open-source Laravel package for bKash, Nagad, SSLCommerz and nine more gateways, with every payment verified server-side before an order is paid.
How to delete code safely: find who depends on it first
A practical process for removing dead code, unused services and stale feature flags without breaking production, from first inventory to final removal.
FAQ
Questions we get asked often.
What does Byte Minus build?
Our main product is Sells Pilot, an AI sales assistant for online sellers in Bangladesh. We also build EduByte for schools, MessLedger, MoneyMate and Grad Ops, and publish open-source packages for Laravel, Node.js and Go.
Is Sells Pilot live?
Yes. Sells Pilot is live at sellspilot.com with a free plan of 100 conversations a month, and paid plans at ৳1,500 and ৳4,500 a month.
Which AI models does Sells Pilot use?
Conversations run on Anthropic’s Claude by default, through a provider-agnostic layer that also supports Google Gemini and Vertex AI, OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock and Azure. OpenAI models handle speech-to-text and embeddings, and Gemini handles images.
How do you stop the AI from quoting wrong prices?
Every outgoing message passes a validation gate in code that checks each price and stock figure against the merchant’s database. A figure the catalog does not support never reaches the customer: the draft is rewritten or a person takes over.
Do you take client projects?
No. We work only on our own products and open-source projects.
Partners, investors and press.
Questions about Sells Pilot, partnerships, investment or press — write to us and a founder will reply.