“Their service has made it very easy for us to spin up VPS-based agentic server instances on demand, without having to deal with the usual complexity of setting everything up ourselves. What has impressed us most is that almost every time we wonder whether their solution can support something we need, we look into it and find out that it can.”Verified review on Trustpilot
The problem
Handled is the social media manager small businesses do not have. It learns a brand, writes weeks of posts, captions and images in advance, and publishes none of it until someone says yes.
That is not a chat product. The work happens ahead of time, between visits, and it only makes sense if the thing doing it knows one business and no other. Every batch has to come out sounding like the business it belongs to, which means the agent has to accumulate that business and nothing else.
“Some people really want to get into the agent tech world, but they feel like it’s very cluttered.”
What they tried
He ran his own copy of Hermes first, self-hosted, and customised it heavily. Then a new version came out.
“Because I had made many customized changes, the update was not smooth. You know, that I had to go through merging flows and such. But I don’t see the typical user doing those type of things just to get the latest features.”
That is the moment the plan changed. Shipping an agent to thousands of small businesses means every one of those agents has to be updatable by somebody other than the person who set it up, which is a fleet problem, not an install problem. He started looking for a name for what he wanted, and found one.
“What I was looking for was more like a managed solution, like WordPress, where you can have a managed WordPress platform where you handle it for different clients. I was looking to have something similar to that, but for AI agents.”
What they run now
Somebody subscribes to Handled and Handled makes one API call. What comes back is that business’s own agent, carrying Handled’s own skills, which is how it knows how to talk to Handled’s publishing service. It reads the customer’s website to get a feel for the brand, drafts the caption, waits, draws the image, waits, and only then schedules.
None of that looks like us. The chat thread, the tappable options, the attachments, the command line, and the buttons that create, start, stop and destroy the agent are all screens inside Handled’s app, under Handled’s name, on the web and on Android. A subscriber never learns there is an Agent 37 instance anywhere.
And between batches, it sleeps. Handled leaves idle sleep on, so an agent parks itself a quarter of an hour after it goes quiet and wakes when the next batch is due. Somebody who posts twice a day is not paying for a machine for the other twenty-three hours.
The outcome
- One agent per subscriber: Provisioned when someone subscribes, holding that one business's brand, voice and history, and nothing from anyone else's.
- Nothing of ours on screen: Chat, attachments, the command line, and start and stop are all surfaces inside Handled's own app, on the web and on Android.
- Asleep between batches: Agents park themselves a quarter of an hour after they go quiet and wake for the next batch, so an idle subscriber costs almost nothing to keep.
Handled owns the product, the brand and the subscriber. We are the part nobody is supposed to notice.