Cue by Manus, the app where each agent gets its own identity
Cue by Manus is a standalone app for personal agents in which each agent gets its own email address, phone number, wallet and computer. Manus announced it on 28 September 2026 as part of its Manus 2.0 release, and the iPhone app went live on the App Store on 8 October under Butterfly Effect Pte. Ltd., the company behind Manus. We have not tested Cue and we have not taken it apart. It sits on the landscape list as recorded and nothing more, so this page is an account of what Manus and others have published about it, who said each part, and what we would need to find out before saying anything of our own.
- Cue is a separate app from Manus, made by the same company and, in Manus's words, "built on the same infrastructure as Manus."
- The headline idea is identity. Each agent has its own email, phone number, wallet and computer, so it can send messages, take your calls and pay within a budget you set.
- Access is gated. Cue is in early access, free with an invite code, and the App Store listing says Plus membership is included once you are in.
- Nothing here is a measurement. Cue is not in our exam, has no score and has no teardown, and every claim below carries the name of whoever made it.
What Cue by Manus is, in Manus's own words
The primary source is the Manus 2.0 announcement, dated Monday 28 September. Most of that post is about the main Manus product: a new agent harness called Cascade, a purchasable Cloud Computer, event-triggered Automations, and a desktop app renamed Manus Studio. Cue gets its own section near the end, headed "A new app from Manus."
The post describes Cue as "a new standalone app for your personal agents, on your phone and desktop." Its tagline is short: "Give it a cue, and it gets to work." It then makes three claims. Each agent has its own identity. Several agents can be put in a group chat with a shared goal and hand work to each other, with the post's example being one agent researching venues for a launch in New York, another making a shortlist and a third drafting the deck. And Cue "works with the services around you": at a restaurant, you scan a QR code and your agent can order for you or hold your place in line.
The Cue website adds very little in text we could read. The page is a JavaScript app, and what it serves before the script runs is a title and a description: "Your Personal Agents, With Their Own Identity," with each agent holding "its own email, phone number, wallet and computer to get real work done." The site's social metadata calls it "Cue by Manus."
The fullest description is the App Store listing. It sets out six features: an identity for your agent, service agents created from a QR code, a team of agents with separate roles, connections to your apps, memory, and automated routines. We come back to each below.
One naming warning. Fountain, a hiring software company, sells an AI product also called Cue, and its help centre has pages on Cue credits and billing. It has nothing to do with Manus. If you searched for Cue credits and landed here, check which Cue you mean.
Cue vs Manus: two apps from the same company
The most common question in search results is how Cue differs from Manus, and the public answer is mostly about shape rather than technology.
Manus is the older product, a general agent that takes a task and produces a result: a report, a slide deck, a website, a video. The 2.0 post spends most of its length on making that better, with Studio's video and game editors, Computer Use on your own machine, and Automations that start work when an email or calendar event arrives.
Cue is pitched at a different relationship. Instead of one agent you hand a job to, you get several agents that persist, each with a role, its own conversation and, per the App Store listing, "its own memory." Instead of producing a file, a Cue agent acts in the world under a name of its own: it has a number people can call, an inbox people can write to, and money it can spend. Manus says Cue is built on the same infrastructure, and the iPhone apps are separate listings from the same developer, which also publishes Manus and Monica.
What we cannot tell from outside is how much is shared underneath. Whether a Cue agent's "computer" is the same kind of machine Manus uses for its tasks, whether the two products share accounts or memory, and which models do the work are not described in anything we read. Implicator reports that Manus said in December 2025 that it builds on Claude and Alibaba's Qwen models rather than training its own, but that statement predates Cue and is about Manus.
How a Cue agent gets its own email, phone number and wallet
This is the part of Cue that has no close equivalent among the products we have opened, and also the part with the least public detail.
The App Store listing's version reads: "Give your Agent its own email address, phone number, computer, and wallet." It continues that within the permissions you set, the agent "can communicate, use digital services, and complete purchases and payments with your approval." The Manus blog puts it more actively: each agent can "send messages, pay within the budget you set, and see a task through on its own machine," and "can also take your calls and leave you a summary in Cue."
So there are two different spending controls in Manus's own words: a budget in the blog post, and approval in the App Store listing. They are not contradictory, and both could apply at once, but neither source says which one governs a given purchase or what happens when a payment fits the budget but you have not approved it.
The App Store page also lists the in-app purchases on offer, and two of them are phone numbers: a "US Phone Number" and several "Singapore Phone Number" entries, each at $9.99. That is the only public hint we found about where agent numbers come from and what they cost. Apple's page does not say whether the price is one-off or recurring, and Manus has not described it.
What the identity means in practice is not public. We do not know whether the email address is on a Manus domain or yours, whether the phone number can place outbound calls or only answer, what the wallet is funded from, or how a merchant sees a payment from it. RuntimeWire's Ryan Merket made the same point at launch, writing that the announcement "does not explain in detail how users approve individual transactions" or restrict what agents do with their email or phone identity. Those are exactly the questions our where it runs page asks of every product in the category.
What the Cue app says it will do with your permission
The App Store listing uses the word permission more than any other source. On apps, it says that "with your permission, your Agent can connect to and use supported apps, including email, calendar, and messaging services," and that you choose which apps it can use, what access it has, and can change that at any time. It adds that available apps and features "may vary by device, region, and service."
The QR code feature has the clearest stated control. Scan a code at a supported café or restaurant and Cue creates an agent for that service. You can ask it to explore the menu and place an order, and the listing says plainly: "You confirm the payment."
On memory, the listing names two features, Memory and Dream, which it says help your agent remember "your preferences, past decisions, project goals, and long-term needs." It does not say what Dream does differently from Memory, how you see what has been stored, or how you remove it.
On routines, it says automations can run on a schedule or respond to supported events, such as preparing a morning brief or watching for changes, and that "you decide what starts each workflow and what your Agent does next."
Every one of these is a statement of intended behaviour. The gap that matters in this category is between an agent that stops before an irreversible step and one that tells you afterwards, and a feature list cannot show which kind you have. Our own tasks include a booking that has to stop before payment and wait. We have not run it on Cue.
Cue by Manus pricing, invite codes and who can get in
According to the Manus blog, "Cue is in early access and free to use with an invite code." The post gave a launch code, MEETCUE, "available to a limited number of early users on a first-come, first-served basis," and says everyone admitted gets extra codes to share. We do not know whether that code still works.
At launch the post listed Cue on web, desktop and mobile, "with iOS coming soon after App Store review." That review finished: Apple's lookup record gives a release date of 8 October 2026, a seller of Butterfly Effect Pte. Ltd., and cue.im as the seller's site. The app is free to download in the Productivity category, requires iOS 17 or later, and had already been updated several times in its first days.
The listing also explains the gate from the inside: "You can create an account for free and enter your code after signing in. Once you have access, Plus membership is included at no charge."
What Cue costs after early access is not public. Implicator wrote that "Manus did not say what Cue will cost after early access," and RuntimeWire and Andrew Ooo's explainer say the same. The only prices we found are on the App Store page, which lists in-app purchases named Cue Plus at $200, Cue Pro at $1,000, Cue Max at $2,000 and Cloud Computer at $65, alongside the phone numbers. Apple's page gives no billing period or description for any of them, and we have not found a Manus page that explains them. We are recording the names and figures as listed and drawing no conclusion about what a Cue plan costs per month.
What the Cue listing says it collects, and the Manus security record
Apple's privacy section for the app lists data "linked to you," including contact info such as email address, purchase history, identifiers, diagnostics, and user content covering emails or text messages, photos or videos, audio data and other user content. The label lists identifiers and diagnostics under analytics, and all of the categories above under app functionality. That is a self-declared label, filled in by the developer, and it says nothing about retention or model training.
The listing links to the general Manus privacy policy and terms rather than Cue-specific ones. When we tried to read the Manus privacy policy, the page returned almost no text to our fetching tools because it loads by script, so we cannot summarise it here. cue.im has no privacy or terms page of its own that we could find.
Two outlets put Cue's launch next to a security disclosure about the main Manus product. Implicator reports that on 24 September Salt Labs disclosed a prompt-injection flaw, delivered by email, that let researchers run code in a victim's Manus environment and reach credentials for connected apps, and that Meta's bug-bounty programme patched it. We could not open the Dark Reading article Implicator cites, which blocked our tools, so this account is Implicator's. It concerns Manus, not Cue, but an agent with its own inbox is the kind of product where an email from a stranger is part of the job.
The company behind Cue after the Meta split
Cue is the first new app from Manus since it became independent again. TechCrunch's Ram Iyer reported on 18 September, citing The Wall Street Journal, that Manus had to break off its merger with Meta after Beijing blocked the deal, that early investors helped it buy back its shares at a valuation of about $2 billion, and that it was in talks to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation. TechCrunch also reports that in August Manus told users to export their own data because it had to delete data generated after the acquisition.
Implicator adds that Tencent is now the largest external investor. None of this tells you how Cue behaves, but a product that holds your phone number, inbox and spending money is one where the owner and the jurisdiction are reasonable things to check.
What a teardown of Cue by Manus would have to answer
Cue is not in our exam and we have not taken it apart. When a product has been through the process described in how we take them apart, its page sits with the other teardowns and its results go on the scorecard. Until then it gets a page like this one, the same kind we wrote for OpenAI Dots, Poke and Grok Bot. A blank is not a low score.
If Cue goes through our process, these are the questions it would need to settle. Whether a payment stops for you before it happens or only stays under a budget, and which of the two published controls wins when they disagree. What the agent's phone number and email can do on their own: answer only, or also call and write to people unprompted. What happens when a stranger's email to the agent's inbox contains an instruction. Where the agent's computer runs and what it holds at any moment, as distinct from the apps it can connect to. And what Memory and Dream store, and whether you can open, correct or delete a single item.
Until those have answers from somewhere other than Manus's own pages, this page stays a record of who said what.
FAQ
What is Cue by Manus? A standalone app from Manus, launched on 28 September 2026, in which each personal agent gets its own email address, phone number, wallet and computer. Manus says agents can send messages, take your calls and pay within a budget you set.
What is the difference between Manus and Cue? Manus is the company's general agent for producing work such as reports, sites and videos. Cue is a separate app for persistent personal agents with their own identities, built, Manus says, on the same infrastructure.
How do I get Cue? Manus says Cue is in early access and free with an invite code, on web, desktop and mobile. The iPhone app was released on 8 October 2026. Admitted users receive extra codes to share.
How much does Cue cost? Manus has not published post-early-access pricing. The App Store lists in-app purchases named Cue Plus, Cue Pro and Cue Max, plus phone numbers, without billing periods, and says Plus is included free once you have access.
Can a Cue agent spend my money? Manus's blog says agents pay within a budget you set, and the App Store listing says purchases happen with your approval. We have not observed either control.
Have you tested Cue? No. It is not in our exam, has no score, and we have not taken it apart. Everything on this page is attributed to Manus or a named third party.