Why 1,000 seats, and why $299

People ask two questions about the beta: why the list is capped, and why the price is what it is. The two answers are the same answer, so here it is once.

The cap

A service that promises to answer to you alone has to know who "you" is. That means a person reads every request, looks at who is asking and what they want to hand over first, and decides whether this is someone the service can do a good job for. It means a person answers when a member writes in. And it means the weekly report each member receives can be acted on, because there are few enough members for their corrections to shape how the service is tuned for them.

All of that stops being possible somewhere in the low thousands. We picked 1,000 because it is a number we can hold to, not because it sounds good. It is also, frankly, the number at which the business works without needing anyone's attention to be for sale.

Seats are released in the order they were requested. A member who brings in two people who are accepted moves into the first release group, and so do the people they bring, because a list built by members vouching for each other is a better list than one built by advertising.

Not every request is accepted. That is not a status game. It is because the service is built for people who already run their affairs across many systems and will hand real work to it, and it will serve someone poorly if that is not their situation.

The price

$299 a month is roughly what a serious professional pays for one good piece of software they could not work without, or a few hours of a competent assistant. It is a lot for an app and not very much for a chief of staff that holds everything, acts under your rules and remembers.

More to the point, it is enough. It pays for the compute, for single-tenant storage, for the people who read requests and answer questions, and for the weekly tuning work, without the service needing a second customer. The second customer is the problem with every free assistant: it is the advertiser, or the data buyer, or the investor who needs a hundred million users. We would rather you be the only one.

The rate is fixed for founding members for as long as they keep the seat. Add-ons are priced separately and can be added or dropped month to month: a model fine-tuned to you and owned by you outright, vetted human operators billed by the hour, and private infrastructure for members who want no shared surface at all. Nothing is charged until your seat opens and you decide to take it.

What founding members get and do not get

They get the fixed rate, a direct line to the people building it, a say in what gets built next, and first access to custom models and human operators as they come online.

They do not get equity, exclusivity, or a promise that the product will never change. They get a service built to the four covenants on the front page, and those do not change with the add-ons or with time.

If that is a trade you would make, request a seat. If you are not sure, read the other two pieces here first, and write to us with whatever is still unclear.