China’s Manus turns its AI agent into a $39 subscription

The recently released Manus artificial intelligence agent is becoming a subscription service, marking a rapid pace to commercialization after it drew comparisons to DeepSeek.

The Beijing-based startup behind Manus has set up a $39-per-month tier and a $199 upgraded option, the latter in line with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro. That’s aggressive pricing for a membership service that is still in its beta testing stage. But the young company has drawn significant attention for its promise to have its bot perform jobs for users, acting as an agent and doing complex tasks rather than just responding to prompts.

The advanced subscription lets users run up to five tasks simultaneously and gives them more computation credits, according to the company’s website. Manus will still have a limited-access free version of the tool, the company said. It is built atop existing large language models, including Anthropic’s Claude family.

Manus released its agent this month with a slick video demonstration, eliciting reactions labeling it the next DeepSeek, a groundbreaking service and company that rattled Silicon Valley by showing performance on par with the best of OpenAI and Meta Platform Inc.’s multibillion-dollar models and systems.

The move to monetize the Manus AI agent so soon after its arrival runs counter to the all-out contest to acquire users in China. DeepSeek R1’s January debut accelerated a price war that was already underway in the country of 1.4 billion, and platform operators like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. announced a flurry of new AI offerings to keep pace. Baidu Inc. made its Ernie Bot free in February.

Butterfly Effect, the parent company of Manus, is in talks with prospective investors to raise funds at a valuation of at least $500 million, The Information reported last week, citing unidentified sources. Butterfly Effect’s current backers include ZhenFund and HSG, formerly known as Sequoia China.