Who does your assistant work for?

There is a question every personal assistant should answer in one sentence, and almost none of them do. Who pays it?

It matters more for an assistant than for any other software, because an assistant acts. It calls the painter. It picks which three insurance agents to ask. It chooses the hotel, fills in the form and, when you say so, pays. Every one of those is a moment where someone other than you could be quietly paying for the outcome.

Our answer: Sparklets is paid by one person. You.

The five things we do not do

• No affiliate cuts. When the assistant finds you a product or a service, we earn nothing from the seller, whatever it picks. The browser it uses drops affiliate and tracking tags from links before it visits them.
• No merchant fees. When it books or buys for you, you pay the merchant directly, on your own card, in a session you can watch. We are not in the payment, and we take nothing from it.
• No ads, and no sponsored answers. Nothing it recommends was paid for by the thing recommended.
• No data sales. We never sell your data or share it with data brokers. It is used to do your work, and for nothing else.
• No commissions from anyone it deals with for you. The painter, the agent, the carrier, the airline. None of them can pay us, and none of them can pay to be chosen.

Membership is our only revenue. That is not a line in a privacy policy. It is the business model, and it is the reason the rest stays true.

Why this is the thing that matters

Think about how a financial advisor is paid. A fee-only advisor is paid by you, so the advice is the product. A commission advisor is paid by whoever's product you buy, so the sale is the product, and the advice bends toward it, slowly and politely, whatever the person's intentions. The incentive does the work.

An assistant is the same, with higher stakes, because you are not reading its advice and then deciding. You are asking it to decide, and to act. If a merchant pays the agent, the agent works for the merchant. It will not say so. It will simply be a little more likely to choose that merchant, a little quicker to say the price is fine, a little slower to walk away. You would never see it.

The only assistant that can represent you is one with nobody else in its pocket.

Why that makes us expensive

A free assistant is paid for by someone. Usually the merchant, through fees, or the advertiser, or the buyer of your data. The cost did not go away. It moved out of sight, and into the recommendations.

Sparklets membership is from $10 a month for Money alone and $30 a month for the assistant, and the work it does is pay as you go. That is more than free, and we would rather be plain about why. Nobody else is paying for it. The model that runs your project, the phone calls it makes, the browser sessions it keeps open for an hour at a time: you pay for those, and in exchange it answers to you and only you. We think that is the right trade for software you hand your household to. We understand it is not the trade for everyone.

What this looks like in practice

A member recently had the assistant get five painters out to quote an exterior job. Four quoted, and the spread was wide. It negotiated the bid he preferred down, and he paid the painter. We did not know the painter, had no arrangement with any of the five, and earned nothing when the job was awarded. The assistant had no reason to prefer one bid except that the member did.

Another member uploaded three insurance policies and asked for quotes. Three agents quoted. The current carrier was cheapest, and the assistant said so, because there was no commission anywhere that could have pulled it another way.

That is the test we would ask you to apply to any assistant, ours included. When it chooses, who else benefits? If the answer is nobody but you, it is yours.