Why people go looking
Manus is a cloud agent. It gets its own virtual machine with a browser, does the job there, and hands back the result. Since March 16 it has also had a desktop app called My Computer, and there’s a Browser Operator that acts inside your own Chrome or Edge. The free tier, 300 credits a day, is generous enough to get you hooked.
The complaints mostly start with the bill. Manus charges in credits, and you don’t know what a task costs until it’s finished (one Hacker News user reported burning about $40 on a single task, which is the kind of number that sends people back to the pricing page). On Trustpilot it has 1.2 out of 5 across 207 reviews, with complaints about billing, refunds and support.
Who owns Manus this month?
Meta announced it was buying Manus for roughly $2 billion on December 29, 2025. China blocked the deal on April 27, 2026. Manus went back to running independently on September 1, and TechCrunch reported on September 18 that it’s raising $500 million at a $4 billion valuation.
If I were about to move a team’s weekly reporting onto Manus, the ownership back-and-forth would bother me more than the credits. Two changes of direction in nine months is a lot for a tool you’d build habits around.
Logging in, in each
Manus’s cloud browser is a machine in someone else’s data center, so you log in during the session. Browser Operator gets around that by working in your own Chrome or Edge with the sessions you already have.
dassi only does the second thing. It sits inside Chrome, Edge or Brave and works on the sites you’re signed into, in the same profile you use all day. When a site has logged you out, it signs in with whatever your browser’s password manager autofills, and you complete 2FA yourself. Your password stays in the password manager and never gets pasted into a chat or into dassi’s settings. The page content and instructions it needs do go to the model provider you picked (through dassi’s relay, if you’re on included credits).
When to choose Manus
If you want the work to happen off your computer, Manus is built for that and dassi isn’t. Its cloud machine keeps going without your browser; dassi’s scheduled runs need your browser open when they’re due. Manus has apps for web, iOS and Android plus desktop apps for Mac and Windows, so you can start something from your phone on the train. For light use, 300 free credits a day may be all you ever need.
When to choose dassi
Take a job like pulling last week’s orders out of a supplier portal and pasting the totals into a Google Sheet, every Monday, more or less forever. It’s all behind logins you already have. It’s also the kind of chore where I’d hate to have a credit meter ticking somewhere I can’t see, because the task is boring and the cost of doing it ought to be boring too.
You’d teach dassi that job once (in plain English, or by walking through it while it watches), save it, and from then on it’s a button, or a schedule, provided the browser is open on Monday morning. On your own API key the software is $10 a month and the tokens show up on your provider’s bill, itemized, which is duller than a credit balance and a lot easier to reason about. Plans with included credits run $25 to $300 if you’d rather not manage a key. The model is up to you, local ones through Ollama included.
What Manus does with the new money, and whether credit prices move because of it, I can’t say yet.