The one-liner
Manus is a general-purpose AI agent in the cloud: give it a goal — research a market, build a spreadsheet, plan a trip, write and ship a small app — and it works in its own virtual computer with a browser, a terminal and a file system until it has a result to show you. It was the first agent to go properly viral, in March 2025, with clips of it working unattended for an hour and coming back with the job done.
Since then it has become two other things: a real business with hundreds of millions in revenue, and the centre of the year's biggest lesson in who gets to own an AI company.
By the numbers — September 2026
What it actually does
A computer of its own — Each task runs in a sandboxed virtual machine with a real browser, a terminal and files. You can watch it work, step in, or close the tab and come back.
Long tasks, unattended — Competitive research across dozens of sites, a data analysis with charts, a comparison of fifty products, a trip booked end to end. The demos that made it famous were an hour of autonomous work per prompt.
Deliverables, not answers — Spreadsheets, slide decks, reports, small web apps, deployed. The output is a file or a site, which is what made it feel like an employee.
Desktop and My Computer — Since March 2026, a desktop app that lets the agent run on your own machine: terminal commands, local files, installed tools, on Mac and Windows.
Scheduled and parallel — Recurring tasks and several agents at once on higher plans.
Manus's honest capability, from people who have measured it: reliable on research and assembly tasks of up to about five dependent steps, with a sharp drop-off beyond that. Good for a well-scoped afternoon of work; not yet for a week of it.
What it costs
| Plan | Price | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 300 credits refreshed daily; one task at a time |
| Pro, first tier | From $20/mo | From 4,000 credits; 20 concurrent and scheduled tasks |
| Pro, second tier | From $40/mo | From 8,000 credits; seven-day trial |
| Team | From $20/seat | Pro features plus SSO, privacy controls, analytics |
Everything is credits, and a long autonomous task can burn a few hundred of them. The free tier is for seeing what it does; the first Pro tier is for occasional real tasks; the second is for people who hand it work daily. Both are priced "starting from", scaling with the credits you want.
Check manus.im before you buy. The tiers have been renamed and repriced more than once this year, and most third-party pricing pages — including ones updated this summer — still quote a $19 / $39 / $199 ladder that Manus's own help centre no longer lists.
The 2026 saga, in order
- 2022: Butterfly Effect founded in China by Xiao Hong, Yichao Ji and Tao Zhang. Its first product, Monica, is a browser assistant.
- March 2025: Manus launches. Self-reported benchmark scores beat OpenAI's Deep Research; invite codes become a black market.
- July 2025: The company moves its headquarters to Singapore, partly to escape US chip restrictions on Chinese firms.
- December 2025: With revenue past $100 million, Meta agrees to buy it for around $2 billion on the 29th and closes the next day, promising no remaining Chinese ownership, and starts wiring Manus into Meta AI and Ads Manager.
- January 2026: China's Ministry of Commerce and NDRC open a security review. By March the two founders are reported to be under exit bans; a hundred staff are already working from Meta's Singapore offices.
- 27 April: The NDRC prohibits "foreign investment in the Manus project" and orders the parties to withdraw. No further explanation.
- 11 June: Meta begins the unwind with an operational split: no data sharing, Manus staff cut off from Meta systems, Meta staff barred from using Manus.
- 11 August: Manus announces it will return to operating as an independent company — and that from the end of the month it will delete some user data created on or after the day Meta closed the deal, to satisfy regulators.
The precedent is the point. Manus had left China, closed its Chinese business and sold to an American buyer. Beijing asserted authority anyway, over technology built by Chinese engineers, and won. Every Chinese-founded AI company, and every Western acquirer, now knows that.
Manus vs OpenClaw vs ChatGPT Work
| Manus | OpenClaw | ChatGPT Work | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shape | Cloud agent with its own computer | Self-hosted agent on yours | Agent inside ChatGPT |
| Setup | None | Real | None |
| Best at | Research and assembly, unattended | Anything you configure | Finished files from your apps |
| Model | Its own routing over frontier models | Any | GPT |
| Data | On Manus's servers, Singapore | Yours | OpenAI's |
| Owner | Independent, Chinese-founded | A foundation | OpenAI |
| Price | Free, from $20, from $40 | Free + model | $20 ChatGPT Plus |
Manus is the most polished zero-setup agent for "go and find out" tasks. The catch is the same as its strength: it is a cloud service from a company whose corporate future was decided by a government this spring.
The catches
- Ownership risk is now product risk. An independent Manus is stable for now; the founders are under travel bans and the company's next move is not in its own hands alone. Annual plans deserve a pause.
- Your data goes to Singapore — and some of it was deleted. The unwind required Manus to delete certain user data created during the Meta year, from the end of August 2026. Fine for most tasks; not for anything a compliance team would ask about, and not somewhere to keep the only copy.
- Credits burn on autonomy. An agent that works for an hour spends for an hour. Scope the task, set the budget.
- Five steps, then check. Beyond a handful of dependent steps, reliability drops. Break long jobs into stages.
- Benchmarks were self-reported. The launch numbers that made it famous were the company's own and are stale; judge it on your tasks.
Who it is for
Yes — Anyone who wants a capable research-and-assembly agent with no setup, will scope tasks sensibly, and is not handling sensitive data. The free tier is a fair test.
Not yet — Anyone whose company cares where data lives or who is unsettled by the ownership question. Wait for the independent company to prove itself.
No — Anyone who wants to own the agent (OpenClaw, Hermes) or whose work lives in their existing apps (Cowork, ChatGPT Work).
Why it matters
Manus proved the demand: a general agent that does an hour's work from one prompt found a hundred million dollars of customers in eight months. Then it proved something else. In April 2026 the most important fact about an AI agent turned out to be where its engineers came from, not what it could do. For anyone building on, buying, or selling an agent company, the Manus order is the new rule of the game.
Glossary
- Manus
- General-purpose cloud AI agent from Butterfly Effect, launched March 2025. Singapore-based, Chinese-founded, independent since August 2026.
- Butterfly Effect
- Manus's parent company, founded in China in 2022; also makes the Monica browser assistant.
- NDRC
- China's National Development and Reform Commission, the state planner that blocked the Meta deal.
- Sandbox VM
- The isolated virtual computer each Manus task runs in, with browser, terminal and files.
- My Computer
- The Manus Desktop feature that lets the agent act on your own machine.
- Credits
- Manus's usage currency, consumed by task length and complexity.
- Exit ban
- A travel restriction; reportedly applied to Manus's two founders during the review.
- Deep Research
- OpenAI's research agent, the benchmark Manus compared itself to at launch.
Liked this? Go deeper.
Manus is the agent Beijing kept. Here is the China story around it, and the agents you can own instead.