Ask My Agent is a system that lives on your own personal accounts, those that you register with two global platforms: Google Cloud and Cloudflare. You give us temporary access and we set things up inside.

These accounts take a minute each to create and invite, and neither requires adding a credit card.

• Google Cloud: A more technical part of Google that anyone with a Google account can use.
• Cloudflare: A well-known company in tech circles that powers 20% of the entire internet.

This is quite different to installing a cloud app from an app store. When you install a cloud app from an app store the cloud computers that power it are typically under the control of the app developer. In our case, the cloud computers that power Ask My Agent are not under our control.

It's sort of like paying one time for software that you install on your laptop. The difference here is that Ask My Agent runs in the cloud, where you don't have a laptop. These personal accounts that you hold with these global platforms can be seen as the next best thing, a sort of quasi laptop in the cloud.

If you're technical, we have a blog article on the general process here.

That's perfectly fine. The platforms where you'll open these personal accounts are technical in nature but most things are abstracted away and you won't have to worry about becoming a part-time software engineer.

The two simple things you will need to learn are how to create an account (or a project, etc.) on these platforms and how to add and remove emails from that newly-created account. Adding and removing emails is not hard. If you've ever added and then removed someone from a Google Doc then consider yourself prepared!

It absolutely does. But history tends to work out in our favour here. For example Google is highly unlikely to stop making Google Docs, Google Drive or Gmail free; getting people familiar with these products is a good thing for Google, important to growing the future Google Workspace customer base, among other things.

The specific free services that Ask My Agent uses (free daily AI usage, free website hosting, etc.) are also likely to remain free for a long time to come, and if anything to grow in generosity.

First, cost! Paying $49 one single time is much nicer than paying $49 every month — the subscription amount that several AI startups with similar functionality charge for minimum practical usage. (Yes many of these AI startups do offer a free tier of their own, but the usage is a fraction of what you get with Ask My Agent's “piggyback off global platforms” model, making them hard to use for anything other than testing. You can see a comparison here.)

Second is privacy. Specifically, protecting your privacy from the eyes of a startup (us). Yes your private data is in the hands of these global platforms, but they have unparalleled experience managing private data, with large and well-funded security teams. Other AI startups must have access to your data because it runs on their systems. In these cases, the best they can do is promise to keep that data confidential, but the internal people-management systems needed to back up such promises are highly complex and take years to implement well. In short, other startups will have privacy commitments to the effect of “we promise we won't look”. For us it's different. We can't look.

Third, customisation. Our business model is based on optional customisation. With Ask My Agent you end up with a system that offers the value of what others offer for $49 per month, but that runs month after month essentially for free. That's a savings of up to $500 per year. Investing a portion of that savings in individual customisations, those that make the system far more useful in light of your unique needs, can be a real win-win.

Once the system has been set up across these personal accounts of yours, you are able to grant access to our update agent. Our update agent will not be able to read your chats, your instructions to your agents and other sensitive info. However it can still keep things maintained.

We do not charge for general updates, and it's also possible for you to connect your own AI agent and have it make the same kinds of fixes when necessary, making a maintenance relationship with us optional.