China’s Manus turns AI agent into subscription service with plans from $39

The recently released Manus artificial intelligence agent is becoming a subscription service, marking a rapid pace to commercialisation 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.