What a billion dollars buys an agent that charges nothing

Instinct has raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, four times the number it confirmed on 26 August and fifty times the one reported for the spring. It publishes no price, no model provider and no unit in which a user's usage is counted, and the product people run beside it, Muse, publishes all three. The round is what it costs to publish none of them.

What is reported, and what is confirmed

On 28 September 2026 the company confirmed the round in a press release: a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation, from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue. It shared no user numbers and no growth figures, and its founder gave no interviews alongside it.

The figure before that was $350 million raised in total at a $2.5 billion valuation. That was a $250 million Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, announced on 26 August 2026 with a line from its founder about road trips and groceries and a wedding. Bloomberg's syndicated report of the same round put the valuation in the spring at $50 million.

The $1 billion was first The Information's, reported on or about 10 September, and the number held: talks to raise about $1 billion at about $10 billion, with Sequoia and Benchmark in talks to lead, the founder declining to comment. The same report, as relayed by the outlets that re-ran it, carries four more claims. More than 100,000 users on an invitation-only beta. Users notified that the service is "operating at full capacity and responses may be slower". A founder who "doesn't want to charge users", with advertising named as the alternative. And a product that runs mostly on open-source models on rented servers, pitched to investors with a plan to own chips and data centres one day. None of it is the company's, and the release that confirmed the round confirmed none of it. Instinct's own site says one thing about what runs it, that its "core model is trained to understand and handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life", and nothing about price, capacity or speed.

The listing here records $1.35 billion raised, from the day the company confirmed it.

What the directory can add

This directory reads every product's pricing page and records the unit it meters usage in, because the unit says where the compute bill lands. 16 of the 91 agents publish one. 9 meter in credits, a unit the company defines and can re-price; Beside, Howie, Lindy, Notis, Predicts, Town and Wajo. Four meter in messages, folk at twenty a day and Ollie at fifty a month among them. The rest count tasks, proactive actions, job applications, minutes of calls, or a daily cap the page does not size.

One meters in tokens, which is the unit the bill from the model provider arrives in. It is Muse. Meta's chief executive said the free tier runs to 100 million tokens a week; a user's upgrade sheet, matching CNBC's report, showed Power at $20 a month for 500 million and Maximum at $100 for 3 billion. Meta's own page names no figure, so those numbers sit on the listing as a chief executive's word and a screenshot. But they are numbers, in the currency the cost is paid in.

A user who priced the free tier put the machine behind it at two cores, eight gigabytes and a hundred gigabytes of disk, roughly $40 to $50 a month at retail before a single token, and called it a loss leader. On 19 September a sector analyst did the same sum with a smaller disk and three clouds and landed at $30 to $60. Neither figure is Meta's; both are the only public arithmetic on what a free agent costs to host.

27 listings publish no price. 16 of those have announced a funding round, which means sixteen companies have told investors a number and told users none. Instinct is one, and it is the only one of them to have raised ten figures. On 28 September its founder said aloud what the pricing page does not. In his first long interview he describes a blanket take rate on transactions, paid by merchants in exchange for distribution. He does not promise the product stays free: asked directly, he says he will not commit to free for a lifetime and calls it his personal goal. So the money is meant to come from the other side of the transaction, and the free part is an intention rather than a price. That is the clearest answer this piece has had to its own question, and it arrived on a podcast rather than on a page. That count was fifteen until 22 September 2026, when Flip published $9.99 a month billed annually and left the set, the first funded listing here to answer the question this piece asks. 49 of the 91 name no company whose model runs them, one more than a week ago, and the extra one is a listing that arrived rather than a listing that changed: Orbits was listed on 21 September 2026 and names none. Instinct is one of those too, and the one sentence on its site about a core model of its own reads against the report of open-source models on rented servers. Both can be true. Neither is published.

One unit exists and is not published. On 23 September a user asked his Instinct why a job had stopped, and the agent answered that the browser it drives with his saved logins has a daily usage allowance, that the day's was spent by about four in the afternoon, and that it resets at midnight; it had armed itself to resume at five past. That is a tier, described to one customer in a thread, by the product rather than the company. It is also the shape of the bill: the browser is the expensive part, and the part being rationed.

The same day, another user posted what he does with the same allowance. Tired of paying for APIs, he has the agent scrape hundreds of surf reports every day into his own database and calls it his app backend: "I'm never paying for intelligence again." A free consumer product with no published unit, and a customer whose standing job is hundreds of page fetches a day, is the whole question in two posts.

The speed record

Slowness is the one cost a free product cannot hide, and the head-to-head has it dated. On 8 September a user gave Muse and Instinct the same job and Muse had booked the dinner while Instinct was still searching for the RSVP. On 9 September a user running three assistants at once wrote that Instinct was shipping integrations quickly and slowing badly under demand, and that Town answered faster over iMessage. On 10 September a founder who gave both a restaurant to book wrote "muse got through all far faster", and went with Instinct anyway because it drove his own browser. The same week, per The Information, the company told its users that responses may be slower. On 18 September an investor's argument against the round, relayed by another, was five words long: "Instinct is slow. That is a sign of compute costs."

Each of those is one person's afternoon, and the site records them as that. Together they are the only public measure of what a free tier at 100,000 users costs, and the measure is time.

The case for charging nothing

The argument for the round is on the same wall, from a venture investor who uses the product daily and says he has bought thousands of dollars of things through it, some of which it offered before he asked. His three ways it could charge: a paid tier for people like him, team features around the agent-to-agent channel priced the way Slack prices history, and a cut of what the agent buys once it is the way you reach the internet. The third is the one the reported plan points at, and it is the one that needs the most users, the most compute, and the longest wait.

A user's own valuation of the product, at five to ten thousand dollars a month, is on the wall beside it. The company charges nothing.

What is not known

What a user costs Instinct in a week, in tokens or in anything. What the round is for, beyond a relayed pitch about chips and a release that says it brings Instinct to more people. How many people that is now: the release gives no number. Whether the "core model" on the site is the model that answers, or a layer over the open-source ones the report describes. Every one of those is paywalled, second-hand, or unsaid, and this piece does not guess at any of them.

What to watch

Flip was the first of the funded listings with no price to publish one, on 22 September 2026. Whether a second of the 16 follows, and whether it is this one. Whether a second listing prices in tokens, which would make Muse's tiers a norm rather than an exception. And whether Instinct names the company whose model runs it, which would be the first sentence about its compute that a user could read.