Town vs ChatGPT

Town is an AI work assistant for people who want to delegate the admin eating up their day. You get your own assistant called a "Townie" (mine's Evie 🦉), which learns about you through your email, calendar, and connected tools.

On my first day, it noticed I followed up on an invoice four times and asked if I wanted it to take over. Um, yes!

It also spotted reporting emails I send every month and suggested handling those too. It was finding work I hadn't even thought to delegate.

It's especially useful for founders, sales teams, recruiters, and anyone managing lots of relationships. It gets even more interesting when your team uses it, because their Townies can work with yours.

• Instantly learns about you and your role
• Proactively spots work it could take off your plate
• Handles recurring tasks, email follow-ups, and scheduling
• Your team can ask your Townie for help while you're away
• Works everywhere (app, SMS, Slack, Telegram, etc)
• Affordable for teams
• It's impossible to not save time using your Townie

• Slight learning curve to get team adoption
• You need to spend some time sorting through which tasks you'd like your Townie to take over (it gives a lot of suggestions)

Town is an AI work assistant built around one "Townie" that learns your work and helps carry out tasks.

If you've ever wished, "I wish I could clone myself", this is the closest I've ever gotten with AI. The idea is that your Townie can answer emails, messages, and do work for you. The work that you'd really rather not do in the first place.

When you create an account, you'll get to name your Townie (mine's name is Evie 🦉). By the time you're finishing onboarding, your Townie will start suggesting work it can take off your plate.

I can message my Townie from anywhere. If it's 11 pm and I'm in bed and I don't want to open my work app, I can just text Evie and say "remind me about this tomorrow" or "can you schedule a meeting with XYZ?" and she already has full context.

Your Townie can work with other people's Townies. For example, say you want to set up a meeting with a group of people. You can just message their Townies to find a suitable time. Since everyone's Townie knows their owner's schedule, they can work together to coordinate (without anyone needing to give up calendar access).

So imagine a future where humans can be left alone when it comes to these menial tasks like scheduling, following up, coordinating humans. This is the first time where I got a glimpse of what that could be.

More examples:

• I was out of office when a coworker needed access to a Superhuman Docs file. They asked my Townie, and it gave him access, knowing he was a trusted coworker. Coming back to my desk with that admin already done is a dream!
• I've scheduled a video shoot and dinner with our editor through Town without opening my calendar or asking everyone for availability.

Heads up, Townies can collaborate via a Town thread within the app, but not within Slack at the moment.

Town can run recurring tasks for yourself, or your entire team. Here are some examples of what we run:

• Every day at 5 pm, Town reads the Granola notes from the partnership calls Alex (my cofounder and Efficient App's CEO) and David (our Head of Partnerships) had that day. It sends a digest of what was discussed and the next steps.
• Every Sunday at 10 am, Town texts me a few questions about my week. I reply with a brain dump of what happened, and the stories that could work as short videos get added to my content tracker.
• Every morning, Town goes through my inboxes and sorts what's there into Urgent and Nice to know. It also lists the low-priority emails I can archive.

• Free: $0. Includes a limited monthly chat allowance, integrations, and a weekly briefing.
• Starter: $15/month, billed monthly. Includes a daily morning briefing, inbox help, two custom daily routines, and 1,250 monthly credits.
• Pro: $49/month per user, billed annually. Includes unlimited custom routines, assistant-to-assistant collaboration, and 5,000 monthly credits.
• • (Get 5,000 credits free with our exclusive Town discount)
• Power: $99/month per user, billed annually. Includes 12,000 monthly credits and higher usage limits.
• Power Plus: $199/month per user, billed annually. Includes 40,000 monthly credits and unlimited person research lookups.

• Team: $59/month per seat, billed annually. Includes a shared workspace and 6,000 credits per seat, pooled across the team.
• Team Plus: $149/month per seat, billed annually. Includes 18,000 pooled credits per seat.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for organizations with additional requirements.

ChatGPT Agent is a mode inside ChatGPT that can reason, research, and take actions for you.

Instead of only answering questions, it can use tools like the browser, uploaded files, connected apps, and spreadsheets to complete more complex tasks.

When I tested agent mode, I was honestly quite disappointed. When I compare it to something like Viktor where there's absolutely no setup, no prompting, no procedure to write (it just KNOWS what it needs to do), ChatGPT Agent felt like what I used 1-2 years ago with other AI employee tools.

The result? I haven't continued to use it after the first day.

That said, if you're already paying for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, it doesn't hurt to experiment. You can build something useful for a narrow, repetitive task.

But if you're looking for an AI agent that actually joins your team, takes proactive action, and doesn't need you to hold its hand? You'll want something purpose-built for that.

• Chat interface makes it easy to use
• Agent templates give you a starting point without building from scratch
• If you're already paying for ChatGPT, agents are included, no extra cost to experiment

• Not proactive. You always have to go to it and prompt it, which defeats the purpose of an "agent"
• Setup is clunky: you have to write SOPs, connect apps, configure everything manually
• Everything lives inside a chat interface, which limits how agents can interact with your actual workflow
• The whole experience felt like where the AI agent space was a year or two ago — not the future

ChatGPT now lets you create agents by chatting with it. You describe the role, connect apps (Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Linear, and more), upload reference files, and define how the agent should behave.

It's essentially giving ChatGPT a job description and standard operating procedure.

While you have templates as a starting point, we found the actual outcomes a lackluster and did not end up incorporating it into our workflow.

Codex is where things get more interesting from an agent perspective, specifically for engineering teams. It can work through coding tasks autonomously and return pull requests.

But it's built entirely to code. It's not going to help your marketing team draft content, give your CEO a cross-department report, or manage follow-ups across your business.

• Free: $0. Limited access to GPT-5.5, no agent mode. Fine for trying ChatGPT as a chatbot, but you won't get agent capabilities here.
• Plus: $20/mo. Includes agent mode, Deep Research (10/mo), Codex, and Sora. This is where most people should start if they want to experiment with ChatGPT agents. The 40-message agent limit can feel restrictive if you're a heavy user.
• Pro: $100/mo or $200/mo. Higher usage limits (5x or 20x Plus), GPT-5.5 Pro, and up to 1M-token context at the $200 tier. Worth it if you're hitting Plus limits daily, but that's a steep price for agent capabilities that still require manual setup.
• Business: $20–$25/seat/mo. Team workspace with admin controls, SSO, and no training on your data. Agent mode included. Makes sense for teams already using ChatGPT who want to standardize across the company.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing, 150-seat minimum. Full governance, HIPAA, audit logs. If you're at this scale, you're likely evaluating dedicated AI agent platforms alongside ChatGPT anyway.