Invite-only AI agents: is it worth the wait?

7 of the 84 agents in this directory make you wait. 25 of them can be started right now by texting a number.

Whether the wait buys you anything is a fair question, and there is one very well documented answer from the last time a consumer product ran this playbook.

What the gate looks like here

Seven listings are behind an invitation or a waitlist: Instinct, Mae, Wajo and Wis.ai by invitation, Air by WZRD, Matcha and Tab by waitlist.

Five of the seven publish no price at all. Four are still marked beta. So the thing you are queueing for is, in most cases, a product that has not said what it costs and does not describe itself as finished.

The comparison people keep reaching for

Clubhouse is the reference, and it is worth knowing the actual numbers rather than the vibe.

It took roughly 10 million installs in February 2021 alone. It peaked that June at about 17 million monthly users and a valuation past $4 billion. Its invitation codes reached around $400 on eBay.

Then downloads fell from about 9.6 million in February to 922,000 by April. Within six months of its peak it had lost roughly 80 percent of its users, and by June 2022 downloads were down about 95 percent from the high.

The mechanism was not the gate. Retention had dropped below 30 percent by mid-2021, which means most people tried it and left. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Telegram all shipped the same core feature within months, and the thing you had queued for was suddenly available without queueing.

Instinct's codes have been seen at around $300, which is close enough to the Clubhouse figure to be worth writing down.

Why the analogy is weaker than it looks

Two differences matter, and they both cut in the gated product's favour.

Clubhouse was the network. Its product was other people in a room, so when people left, what remained got worse for everybody still there.

A personal agent is a tool. If half the users leave, yours books the same restaurant.

The stated reason for the gate is also different. Instinct's founder says he spends about 40 percent of his time acquiring compute, that demand has been roughly doubling weekly, and that buying at short notice costs three or four times as much. On that account the invite cap is a way of not waking up to ten times the users and being unable to serve them.

This site cannot check whether that is the whole reason. It is a coherent one, and it describes a supply problem rather than a demand tactic.

What the wait actually costs you

Nothing, if you join a queue and carry on with your day. Something, if you buy a code from a stranger, because the account you are buying will hold your inbox and, in many cases, your card.

The opportunity cost is real too. 25 agents here need no account at all, and the products easiest to try are also the least likely to tell you what they cost. One of those facts is convenient and the other is not.

What to watch

Whether any of the seven opens up, and what happens to its numbers when it does. Clubhouse dropped its invitations in July 2021, a month after peak, and the opening did not reverse the decline.

Then whether a gated product here ever publishes a price before it opens. Five of seven have not, which means the queue is currently for something whose cost you will learn after you are in.