Everyone gets a personal assistant that can actually pay for things, safely. You set a small weekly allowance and clear rules; the agent clears the boring online errands, explains every decision, and asks before anything over your limit. The money can never go further than you allowed.
2. Why people can't resist it
The list shrinks while you sleep. Ten tiny chores that each needed a login, a form and a card now take one sentence. The relief is physical.
It finds money. The weekly "saved you 18.40 EUR" line makes the allowance feel like it pays for itself.
Control you can feel. The approval card, the live step log and the trust score turn a scary idea (an AI with money) into something you watch and steer.
3. How it works for real
Login and wallet: email or passkey. A smart wallet on Base is created behind the scenes (Coinbase Smart Wallet, Privy or Dynamic); a paymaster sponsors gas. The user tops up with card or bank to USDC.
Allowance as code: the agent gets a session key with an on-chain spend policy: weekly cap, per-errand cap, allowlisted merchants and categories, and an expiry. It cannot exceed these even if the model misbehaves.
Planning: a frontier LLM (Claude or GPT via OpenRouter) turns "renew my padel club and buy ink" into a plan, explains choices, and writes the report. A fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek) classifies errands and extracts prices.
Doing: a headless browser agent visits sites; a vision model reads pages when there is no API. Where merchants support it, payment is per request over x402 in USDC. Elsewhere, a single-use virtual card is issued by a card partner for the exact amount, merchant-locked.
Approvals: anything above the per-errand cap, a new merchant, or a subscription change sends a push card. Approval signs a one-time policy bump.
Receipts and audit: every step and payment is logged with a hash on Base; receipts are parsed and attached. Refunds route back to the allowance automatically.
4. Cost per use
A typical errand: 20 to 60 browsing steps with a fast model plus a few frontier calls, about $0.02 to $0.08. Vision page reads: about $0.005 each. Gas: under $0.01, sponsored. Virtual card issuance: about $0.10 to $0.20 per card through the partner.
Free: 5 errands a month, x402 merchants only, weekly report. Paid ($6.99 per month): unlimited errands, card rails for any site, voice inbox, price watching, family allowances. An optional 20 second "week in errands" recap video uses a cheap video model at about $0.10 per second on paid only; free gets still panels.
5. Growth loop
Every errand that touches another person (a booked padel court, a gift delivered) carries a "booked by my Errand Runner" note with a link. The weekly savings card gets shared. Friends who join from it get their first week of allowance bonus. Merchants who add x402 get faster agent traffic, so they promote it too.
6. Risks and guardrails
Runaway spending: hard on-chain caps, allowlists and expiring session keys. The model cannot raise its own limit.
Card safety: never store raw card numbers. Card rails use tokenised single-use virtual cards from a licensed issuer, locked to one merchant and amount.
Wrong purchases: the agent explains every decision before paying, returns are tracked, and refunds go straight back to the allowance.
Scams and prompt injection: merchant allowlist, page content is treated as data not instructions, and new domains need approval.
Accountability: a complete audit log with timestamps, sites visited, prices seen and payment hashes, exportable at any time. Pause everything with one switch.
7. MVP build order
Email login, smart wallet on Base Sepolia, allowance policy with a session key and caps.
Errand inbox with text input and a planner model that writes the step plan.
One x402 merchant end to end (for example a parking fine API or a sandbox shop), with receipts and audit log.
Approval cards for over-limit errands.
Weekly report with savings found, plus the share card.