Instinct vs Town
Two products the market keeps pairing and their own founders say are not competitors: one is free and fully subsidised for a person, the other charges the company whose team uses it.
Side by side
| Instinct | Town | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting in | ||
| Channels | iMessage | iMessage, SMS |
| How you start | Invite only | Create an account |
| Who starts it | Acts without asking | Messages you first |
| Price | ||
| Pricing | Not published. The listing has no public site. | Free $0 forever with 30 chat messages a month, Starter $15/month, Pro $49/month, Power $99/month. Credit-based above the free tier. |
| What it can do | ||
| Can do | Email, Calendar and scheduling, Bookings and reservations, Travel, Task management, Web research, Phone calls, Persistent memory, Talks to other people's agents | Group threads |
| Policy | ||
| Trains on your conversations | Policy not reviewed | Policy not reviewed |
| Who runs it | ||
| Status | Live | Live |
| Company | Spear Street Technology | Town |
Rows where the two agree are dimmed. Checked 2026-09-06.
What actually differs
They differ on getting in, price, what it can do, and who runs it. They match on policy.
Town's co-founder made the argument himself: the harnesses are similar and the customers are not. Town takes revenue from companies whose teams use it and gets network effects when several people in one workspace are in the same threads; Instinct is free and fully subsidised, which reads as customer acquisition rather than as a business. Whether that holds is the interesting part, because on every field this directory records they look alike.
The one recorded head-to-head from somebody using both put it plainly: Town replies faster over iMessage than Instinct and can be added to a group chat, and the open question about Town is when it starts charging and what happens when the free tokens run out. That is the difference between the two arguments in one sentence, a product that has not said what it costs against a product that has decided not to charge.
Group is where they actually diverge. Town is built for a thread with other people in it. Instinct answered the same question from the other end by shipping an agent-to-agent protocol, so one person's agent negotiates with another person's agent inside a trusted circle rather than everybody sharing one assistant. Those are two different bets about what multiplayer means, and the week's loudest argument is that whichever of them works is the whole prize.
Neither publishes a price and neither publishes a privacy policy we could read, so the rows on both listings that would settle any of this are empty.
Instinct is for
One person who wants everything handled and will supervise an agent that acts first.
Town is for
A team that wants one assistant several colleagues can use, and someone to send the invoice to.
See every agent compared or answer five questions to narrow it yourself.