A cloud chatbot in iMessage versus an assistant that actually knows your life. Same surface, completely different depth.
Ostler: $99 Hub once + $9.99/mo Pro – AI on your hardware, your data stays on your hardware.
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 | $99 once + $9.99/mo | $10/mo+ |
| Messaging channels | iMessage and email | iMessage + WhatsApp (separate) |
| Knows your relationships | Yes – a knowledge graph of everyone you know | No |
| Morning briefs | Yes (daily, on your phone) | 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 inexpensive.
Ostler’s assistant lives in your messages too. But your assistant is backed by a knowledge graph of your entire digital life. Ask “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 imports data from twenty platforms (including WhatsApp archives) into a single knowledge graph. Your AI assistant knows everything across every source, not just one at a time.
Ostler’s assistant answers on iMessage and email. Same knowledge, same personality, two channels. Morning briefs arrive on your phone. 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. Your assistant 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 is $99 once for the Hub (yours forever) plus $9.99/month for Ostler Pro – the ongoing intelligence layer that ingests new messages, runs daily briefs, and powers the iOS app. Pro is cheaper than ChatGPT Plus alone, and it knows your life. The Hub side keeps working forever, even if Pro pauses.
Poke just became the first AI agent approved on Apple’s Messages for Business platform. To get there it had to become a business you text, pass months of Apple review, and pay Apple a per-user fee for every customer it has – and every message still routes to Poke’s servers. Ostler’s assistant needs none of that. It is your own identity on your own Mac: no platform to be approved by, no per-user toll, no data leaving your device. The iMessage surface looks the same; what stands behind it could not be more different.
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 and email? Poke is a convenient shortcut to cloud AI. Ostler is your personal knowledge system with a messaging interface.