Last verified on 26 April 2026. Pricing, features, and policies change – check the source if anything looks off.
Ostler: $49.99 + $24.99/mo – replaces $87/mo of cloud AI subscriptions.
Poke: $10/mo+ – iMessage chatbot with cloud AI. No knowledge graph, no relationship intelligence.
Ostler is the only AI assistant that actually knows your life – every face, every message, every meeting, every email loaded in, kept on your Mac, private to you. Poke is a cloud chatbot that answers on iMessage for $10/mo. Same surface, completely different depth. Poke knows nothing about you until you tell it; Ostler already has twenty years of your messages, emails, and contacts loaded in before you send the first word.
| Ostler | Poke | |
|---|---|---|
| Your data | Stays on your Mac | Sent to Poke's servers |
| AI inference | Local (Ollama) | Cloud (GPT-4 / Claude) |
| Price | $49.99 once + $24.99/mo | $10/mo+ |
| Messaging channels | iMessage + WhatsApp + email | iMessage + WhatsApp (separate) |
| Knows your relationships | Yes (graph of 1,800+ people) | No |
| Morning briefs | Yes (daily, via WhatsApp) | No |
| Meeting prep | Yes (relationship context + history) | No |
| Multi-platform import | 20 platforms via GDPR | No import |
| Personal wiki | Auto-generated, 21 page types | No |
| Web search | Yes (local via SearXNG) | Yes (cloud) |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
Poke is ChatGPT in iMessage. You message it, it answers. It is a convenient interface to cloud AI models. It can search the web, answer questions, help with tasks. It is well-made and free.
Ostler's assistant – Marvin – lives in your messages too. But Marvin is backed by a knowledge graph of your entire digital life. Ask Marvin "When did I last see Sarah?" and it checks your conversation history, calendar, and social media data. Ask Poke the same question and it cannot answer – it does not know who Sarah is.
The iMessage interface is identical. What sits behind it is completely different.
Poke supports iMessage and WhatsApp, but treats them as separate channels – it does not cross-reference conversations across both. Ostler connects all three channels (iMessage, WhatsApp, and email) into a single knowledge graph. Your AI assistant knows everything across every channel, not just one at a time.
Ostler's Marvin is on iMessage, WhatsApp, and email. Same knowledge, same personality, three channels. Morning briefs arrive via WhatsApp. Meeting prep arrives before your calendar events. Evening wraps summarise your day.
Every message you send to Poke goes to their cloud servers. Your questions, your context, your conversations – processed by Poke's infrastructure. At $300M valuation with $25M raised, Poke is a VC-funded company that needs to monetise your data or your attention eventually.
Ostler processes everything on your Mac. Marvin runs locally via Ollama. Your messages to the assistant never leave your house. There is no server to breach, no investor pressure to monetise your conversations.
Poke starts at $10/month. It is a straightforward iMessage chatbot subscription – cloud AI, no personal knowledge, no relationship intelligence.
Ostler costs $24.99/month. But it replaces not just a chatbot – it replaces ChatGPT ($20/mo), meeting notes tools ($17/mo), and personal knowledge management ($10/mo). The $24.99 subscription covers unlimited local AI, personal knowledge, and conversation processing. $24.99/mo replaces $87/mo of cloud AI subscriptions.
Any AI company can build an iMessage chatbot. Apple could shut third-party iMessage bots down tomorrow. Poke's technology – wrapping cloud AI in a messaging interface – is not defensible.
A 10-year relationship graph built from 20 platforms of personal data is genuinely hard to replicate. The longer you use Ostler, the more valuable it becomes. That is a real moat.
Do you want a $10/mo chatbot in iMessage that answers questions from the internet? Or do you want an AI assistant that knows your life, your relationships, and your history – available on iMessage, WhatsApp, and email? Poke is a convenient shortcut to cloud AI. Ostler is your personal knowledge system with a messaging interface.