Which AI agents can you text without an account?
25 of the 84 agents here start with a text to a number. No signup, no app, no waitlist. What each one asks of you first, counted.
25 of the 84 agents in this directory start with a message to a number. No install. No account. No queue.
Another 11 start with a tapped link, which is close to the same thing.
The ladder
Everything here was read for one question: what does it want from you before it does anything useful. That is a field on every listing, so it can be counted rather than guessed at.
| Actions first | Agents | Which ones |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing at all | 4 | brobot, Ollie, Shuffle, Sidekicks |
| One action | 36 | Arlo, asaply, Beside, Boba, Caddy, Dunnit, DUO, Ember, Eugene, Flip, folk, Homer, iChatWithGPT, Iris, Jarvie, Juke, Kachi, Mochi, Navi, Nudge, Orchid, Ori, Otty, Pally, Predicts, remi, Series, Served, Soar, Stanley, Super, Tempo, textmyagent, Tomo, Zapia, Zeme |
| Two actions | 1 | Boardy |
| Three actions | 28 | Airtap, alfred_, allora, Arlo (arlomind.com), Bo, Boski, Brea, Catch, Ditto, Duckbill, Espa, Howie, iHermes, Lindy, Lucas, Manoa, Martin, Maxi, Muse, Notis, Persona, Poke, Sabi, Slashy, Town, TryOpenClaw, Vellum, Zo Computer |
| Four actions | 3 | 222, Alfi, Orbits |
| Five actions | 3 | Hermes, OpenClaw, OpenInstinct |
| Cannot be counted | 9 | Air by WZRD, Instinct, Mae, Matcha, Miso, Rene, Tab, Wajo, Wis.ai |
The two ends are further apart than people expect. At one end you send a text. It works. At the other you are provisioning a server, or waiting on an invitation from somebody who only has five to give.
Why so many agents skip the signup
The thread is the product. An agent living in iMessage or WhatsApp has no install step to lose people at, and the cost of trying it is a single message. One. That is the whole distribution argument for building inside somebody else's app rather than shipping your own.
There is a catch. The platform writes the rules, so there is no task list, no interface beyond a bubble, and the company whose app it is can change the terms whenever it likes.
The thing that goes with it
The products easiest to try are the least likely to tell you what they cost. Of the 25 you can start by texting, 3 publish a paid price. Behind a signup it reverses almost completely.
That is not cheap products hiding a bill. Something designed to be tried on impulse has nothing to gain from answering the price question before you are in the thread, so it does not. The full split is here, with every listing and what each says it costs.
Before you send the first message
Two rows are worth reading on any listing you are about to text, and both are on every page here.
First, what it does with your messages. 23 of 84 say plainly that they do not train on your conversations. 6 give you a switch instead.
Second, what happens to everyone else in the thread if you add it to a group. That is the most common blank here. It is also the one affecting people who never chose any of this, which is why it is worth a look before you press send.
Every listing is filterable by how you start, what it can do and what it costs.