Chris Nguyen
Founder @ ETEC+
“Ideally I just want to sell, and not do any backend.”How ETEC+ stopped building servers and started selling seats
Open Instinct · Open source · MIT
Launch your own Instinct.
The open-source app for selling an AI assistant your customers text on iMessage. Every customer gets their own agent. You run the business from one dashboard.
Free to fork. You pay only for the services it runs on.
yourbrand.com/admin
OIOpen Instinct
any ramen near union square still open after 10 tonight? nothing fancy
Yep, Hinodeya Ramen on O'Farrell St is right by Union Square and open until 1:30am tonight. Casual, bowls around $20 to $30.
hinodeyaramen.com/union-square
perfect, thanks
What your customers get
An assistant they just text.
No app, no new habit. They subscribe on your site, text your number, and their own agent answers.
They subscribe on your site
Your name, your price. Stripe takes the card and bills them every month.
Then they just text
They text a code once to link their phone. After that it is plain iMessage. No app to install.
It gets things done
Their agent has its own computer and browser. It looks things up, compares options, plans, and sends back the link.
It remembers them
Names, preferences, plans. Every text builds on the last one.
What you get
Run the whole business from /admin.
One screen for everything a founder needs to watch.
Setup checks
Which keys are in place and what to fix, before a customer notices.
The business at a glance
Customers, paying customers, MRR, and who texted this week.
Every customer's numbers
Subscription, phone, message counts, and what their agent costs you. Never what they wrote.
One-click fixes
Retry a setup, stop or start an agent, delete a cancelled customer's agent.
What's included
The whole subscription business, already built.
Fork it and change what makes it yours. The rest works on day one.
Stripe subscriptions
Checkout, billing portal and webhooks. A cancel stops the agent, and a resubscribe brings it back with its memory.
iMessage
Customers text your number through Photon, and their own agent texts back.
One private agent per customer
Each runs on its own computer, so one customer never sees another's messages or memory.
Web chat
The same agent and the same memory in the browser, for when a customer is at their desk.
Your brand, your niche
Change the name, the agent's instructions and the price. Make it a travel planner, a study coach or a concierge.
Setup your coding agent runs
Paste one prompt into Claude Code or Codex. It follows the setup guide and asks you only for your keys.
How to launch
From fork to first customer.
Your coding agent does the setup. You hand it four sets of keys.
- 01
Fork the repo
Clone it and open it in Claude Code or Codex.
- 02
Add your keys
Agent37, Supabase, Stripe and Photon. Setup creates the database, the price and the webhooks.
- 03
Deploy
To Vercel or any Next.js host.
- 04
Open /admin
Check every line of the setup panel is green, then share your signup link.
Paste this into Claude Code or Codex in the repo folder:
Set this repo up end to end: follow SETUP.md. Ask me for the keys that are behind a login, then do everything else, deploy it, make me the operator, and give me my /admin link.
Costs
Know what every customer costs you.
The code is free. Each service bills you directly, and /admin shows the Agent37 cost of every customer.
Each customer's agent
Agent37
$4.94/mo if it ran all month. It sleeps when nobody is texting, and a sleeping agent costs $0.54/mo.
AI model use
Agent37
Billed as used. You set a monthly cap per customer, $10 by default.
iMessage
Photon
Free for 10 customers, $25/mo for up to 100.
Payments
Stripe
Stripe's standard fees.
Sign-in, database and hosting
Supabase, Vercel
Free tiers work to start.
Each agent is 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 6 GB disk, metered by the minute at Agent37's published rates. Photon and Stripe prices are theirs and can change.
Built on Agent 37
Founders already sell agents on Agent 37.
Branded agent businesses with one agent per customer, and nobody on call for servers.
Andrew Schwartz
CEO @ Lionox
“I'm really obsessed with your tool.”How Lionox launched its own branded agent product in a day
FAQ
Is Open Instinct free?
Yes. It is MIT licensed: fork it, rebrand it, charge what you like. You pay Agent37, Photon, Stripe and your host for what you use.
Is this affiliated with Instinct?
No. Open Instinct is an independent open-source project from Agent 37 for running your own assistant business.
How is it different from other Open Instinct projects?
Those run one assistant for yourself. This one runs a business: signups, subscriptions and a separate agent for every paying customer.
Do I need to code?
You need to be comfortable running a coding agent like Claude Code or Codex. It does the setup and asks you for each key.
Can customers see each other's data?
No. Every customer's agent runs on its own computer, with its own memory and files.
Can I use my own phone number?
On Photon's free and $25 plans, customers text a shared number. A single branded number is Photon's Business plan.
What happens when a customer cancels?
Their agent stops and keeps its memory. If they come back, it picks up where it left off. You can delete it from /admin.
Your Instinct, under your name.
Fork the code, add your keys, and send your first customer the link.
- MIT licensed
- Stripe built in
- iMessage built in