Summary. Poke is the AI assistant that was the first official AI agent approved for Apple Messages, founded by Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel, who met at a middle-school hackathon in Germany. Poke Human, its hybrid human-plus-AI tier at $199 a month, runs payouts and spending for the human assistants on Whop: identity verification, bank withdrawals and virtual Visa cards with spend controls. If your software has humans in the loop who need to be paid and need to spend, this is the pattern.
What Poke was doing before Whop
The write-up frames the product decision first. Most AI companies try to replace the human entirely; Poke decided to pair the agent with a person for the tasks the agent cannot finish. That created two money problems: paying the humans, and letting them spend on the user’s behalf.
Poke had already sent more than 100 million messages and has since been acquired by Cognition at what the write-up calls a low-nine-figure valuation.
What changed on Whop
Each human assistant verifies identity through Whop, connects a payout method and withdraws to a bank. For spending, each gets a Whop Card, a virtual Visa with spend controls and transaction tracking, so an assistant can book the flight or buy the gift inside a limit the company set. Eligible purchases earn 5% cashback.
The article’s comparison for the price point: “Think about it: a full-time personal assistant can cost between $70,000 and $125,000 a year.” Poke Ultra is $199 a month.
The numbers
Whop reports more than 100 million messages sent, the $199 a month price for Poke Ultra, the $70,000 to $125,000 cost comparison for a full-time assistant, and the Cognition acquisition. It does not report how many human assistants Poke pays, payout volume, or card spend.
What I would tell a software founder to copy
Put the humans on rails before you scale them. Paying contractors by hand and reimbursing their expenses by spreadsheet is how a hybrid service collapses at 50 assistants. Payouts with KYC and cards with limits are the two rails; rent both.
Price against the alternative, not against software. $199 a month reads expensive next to a chatbot and cheap next to a $70,000 assistant. Your canonical page should make that comparison in the first paragraph, with your real price and the real alternative.
Measure the human minutes. With Google Analytics 4 and Tag Manager on the app, or your own event pipeline, log when a task escalates to a human and what it cost. That number decides your margin.
Get named proof. A user who says what the assistant booked and what it saved, on the record, is worth more than “100 million messages.” Then put a dollar a day behind the user story that already got comments.
Who this is not for
Whop here is a payout, verification and card-issuing layer; it is not the assistant, the messaging integration or the task router. The base rate is 2.7% + 30¢, 20 basis points under Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢, and the optional layers, managed tax at 2%, orchestration at 0.8% and billing at 0.5%, can push the stack above Stripe. Financing requires $30,000 processed from 10 or more customers in 90 days and a dispute rate under 2%, and it is unavailable to gambling, sports betting, trading signals, credit offers and adult categories. Cards and payouts are priced separately from checkout, and cashback terms have eligibility rules, so read the card schedule before you model the margin.
If you were going to use Whop anyway
If you were going to sign up for Whop anyway, sign up through my link, dennisyu.com/go/whop, or send me your business name and email and I will submit the referral. Whop pays me a share of its profit on your account; your rate is the same 2.7% + 30¢ either way. In return my team at Local Service Spotlight sets up the AI agents that audit your public reputation, fix what they find, and keep it maintained: a personal brand analysis, Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager and Search Console with conversion events that actually fire, a Content Factory that turns one recording into a definitive article, clips and posts, and a weekly Metrics, Analysis, Action report. That is the work we normally charge software businesses for.
Source and disclosure
This story is retold from Whop’s own write-up, Poke, the first official AI agent approved for Apple Messages, launches Poke Human, powered by Whop (2026-07-30), which you should read in full. I am a Whop partner and earn a share of Whop’s profit from businesses that sign up through my link. Whop did not pay for or review this article. See Whop for software and SaaS for the other software stories and my full notes on what Whop costs, and my main Whop page for the partner program.