Manus

Manus is an AI agent: instead of just answering a question, it's built to take a task and carry it out, from researching a topic to building a website or a slide deck. Is Manus AI free? Not on its pricing page. The plans start at $20 a month ($17 if you pay yearly), and everything you ask it to do is paid for in credits. It's worth it if you regularly hand off research, reports or simple websites and would rather review a finished draft than build it yourself. If you just want answers, a chatbot is cheaper.

That's the short version. Here's what I found when I went through it, and how to pick a plan without overpaying.

What Manus is, in plain English

Most AI chat apps are conversations: you ask, they answer, you copy and paste. Manus is built around a different idea. The home page greets you with "What can I do for you?" and a box that says "Assign a task or ask anything", and that word, assign, is the whole point. You describe the job, and the idea is that Manus works through it on its own until there's something to hand back.

Right under the box there are shortcuts that show what kind of jobs it expects: Create slides, Build website, Create games and Video, the last two marked as new, plus a More button. Down in the site's footer there's a longer list: an AI design tool, AI slides, an image generator, a music generator, a browser operator, Wide Research (which the pricing page ties to scaling up bigger tasks), Mail Manus and a Slack integration. There are mobile and desktop apps and an API for developers too.

One thing you'll notice at the top of the site right now: a banner saying Manus "has resumed independent operations" and that its "next chapter starts now". Whatever the story behind it, the product and its prices are what I'm reviewing here.

What I could see without an account

The home page, the task box and the shortcuts are all there to look at, and so is the full pricing page. What you can't do without signing up is actually run a task: that takes an account, and tasks spend credits. So everything I tell you about how a task behaves comes from Manus's own plan descriptions, and you can check it yourself on your first task.

Credits: the part that decides your bill

Sorry, this bit is a little technical, but it's the one that matters. Everything Manus does runs on credits, and the three plans are basically three sizes of the same credit bucket.

Each plan comes with a monthly pot of credits: 4,000, 8,000 or 40,000. On top of that, every plan lists "300 refresh credits everyday", a smaller daily allowance on top of the monthly one. The pricing page tucks the details behind a little help icon, so once you're in, keep an eye on how the two pots go down as you work.

What the pricing page doesn't tell you is how many credits a typical task costs, and that's the number that decides everything. A quick question and a multi-page research report are very different jobs, and an agent that browses, writes and builds for a long time will likely spend more than one that finishes in a couple of steps. My advice is simple: on your first few tasks, look at how many credits each one used. That tells you more about the right plan than any comparison table.

Manus pricing, plan by plan

The plans don't have names on the pricing page, just a short description each ("Standard monthly usage" and so on), so I've borrowed those.

Every plan also includes 300 refresh credits a day, early access to beta features, 20 tasks running at the same time and 20 scheduled tasks, plus something called Cue Plus. The page labels yearly billing "Save 17%".

The middle plan is the interesting one. At $40 you get 8,000 credits, but a menu on the card lets you raise that to 12,000, 16,000 or 20,000 credits a month. The $40 price is for the 8,000 option, so check the price the card shows once you pick a bigger one. It's the most flexible way to pay for exactly what you use.

The top plan at $200 is for people who run Manus all day. It's also the only one that mentions websites with data analytics. For almost everyone else, it's a big jump for credits you may never spend.

There are separate plans for teams and businesses too, "from startups to enterprise", and the pricing page mentions SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications, which matters if you're buying it for a company.

Is Manus AI free?

Not in the way most people hope. The pricing page shows three paid plans and no free tier, so the cheapest way in is $20 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly. You can create an account from the Sign up button on the home page, and the site's offers can change, so it's worth checking what a new account comes with the day you join. But if you plan to use Manus for real work, budget for a paid plan from day one.

Which plan is worth it

For most people, the $20 plan. It has nearly every feature the other plans have, including 20 tasks running at once, and 4,000 credits plus the daily refresh credits is enough to find out whether Manus fits the way you work. Pay monthly for the first month or two. Once you know how many credits your usual tasks eat, you'll know whether you need more.

If you run out every month, move to the $40 plan and pick the credit level that matches your real use. That's better than jumping straight to $200. Only go for the top plan if Manus has become part of your daily work and you're burning through 20,000 credits a month without trying.

Who it's for, and who should skip it

It's a good fit if you spend hours on research, reports, slide decks or simple websites, and you're happy to review and fix a finished draft rather than build it step by step. Scheduled tasks help too if you want something done on a regular basis, like a weekly roundup.

It's also worth a look if you already use a chatbot and keep hitting the same wall: it tells you how to do the job, and you still have to do it.

Skip it if what you mostly do is ask questions, write emails or brainstorm. A regular AI assistant does that for less money and with no credits to watch. Skip it too if you're a developer who wants full control over the code: an agent that builds the whole website for you isn't the same as a tool that helps you write it.

Manus or something else?

If most of your day is questions and writing, ChatGPT covers more ground for less. If you work with long documents and want the AI to think a problem through with you, I'd compare Manus against Claude. If your "task" is really a question that needs sources, Perplexity gets you a cited answer without an agent run. And if the website or app is the whole point and you want to keep coding it yourself, Replit is built for exactly that.