# Polsia Alternative: Octomind vs Polsia, Honestly (October 2026)

> A Polsia alternative for founders who want control: what Polsia sets up, what it charges now (3% of payments, 20% of ad spend) and what Octomind lacks.

Polsia's homepage says "AI That Runs Your Company While You Sleep" and, a line later, "Never hire again." Searches for it went from about 50 a month a year ago to over 60,000 in September, and the questions people ask next are the useful ones: is it legit, what does it really cost, and what else does the same job.

I make Octomind, a Polsia alternative, so I'm biased toward one answer. That's why this comparison starts with what Polsia does better, uses Polsia's own terms for its fees, and ends with what still takes setup on Octomind. We run our own marketing on octos, Octomind's agents, so the Octomind side comes from what has gone right and wrong for us, not from the pricing page.

**The short answer:** Polsia is the faster start. You type an idea and it sets up the email address, landing page, database, Stripe and a nightly agent cycle for you; it charges a 3% platform fee on payments through it and 20% of the ad spend it manages, per its current terms. Octomind is the more flexible one. You set it up yourself (one octo with a nightly routine that calls specialist agents for code, research and media, and your own Stripe through its MCP server), pick any model, and pay a flat $50 or $200 a month with model usage included and nothing taken from your revenue. Pick Polsia if you want it done for you and accept its rails. Pick Octomind if you'd rather own each piece and you're fine spending an evening setting it up.

## Polsia alternative: the quick verdict

Checked October 24, 2026, against Polsia's homepage and terms (policy version 2026-09-17) and Octomind's plan table.

|                        | Polsia                                                                                             | Octomind                                                                                      |
| ---------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Start**              | One prompt; it sets up the company                                                                 | You create the octo and write its routine                                                     |
| **Who plans the work** | A "CEO" agent each night                                                                           | A routine you write once; the octo picks each night's work                                    |
| **Agents**             | One name for every role: roadmap, code, ads, customer replies, deals, posts                        | One octo per workstream, plus specialist agents you call in                                   |
| **Models**             | Chosen by Polsia                                                                                   | Any model in the hub, or your own provider key                                                |
| **Email**              | A company address, outreach built in                                                               | An octo can get its own inbox that receives mail and replies in the thread; no bulk outreach  |
| **Website**            | Hosted landing page and app                                                                        | Your octo builds it on its machine; 5 live URLs on Pro, 20 on Max; no custom domain yet       |
| **Payments**           | Stripe set up for you, 3% platform fee                                                             | Your own Stripe through Stripe's MCP server; 0% to us                                         |
| **Ads**                | Runs Meta ads, 20% of the ad budget                                                                | Not built in                                                                                  |
| **Extending it**       | No public MCP support, per [cto.new](https://cto.new/guides/polsia-vs-cto-ai-business) (June 2026) | Any MCP server; open-source engine (Apache 2.0)                                               |
| **Price**              | Free to start; $49/month reported, plus per-task credits                                           | Pro $50/month ($20 the first), Max $200 ($80 the first), model usage included up to the price |
| **After you leave**    | Infrastructure stays accessible 30 days, then may be deleted                                       | Machines stop, data kept 30 days; code you pushed stays in your own GitHub repo               |

Sources: [Polsia homepage](https://polsia.com), [Polsia terms](https://polsia.com/terms), [Octomind pricing](/pricing). Polsia's subscription price isn't on its site; $49 comes from [reviews](https://www.willo.ai/blog/polsia-review) and press coverage.

## What Polsia does well

The pitch is real: Polsia turns "I have an idea" into a running setup with no decisions in between. According to the founder's interviews, as summarised in a [July 2026 guide on jwatte.com](https://jwatte.com/blog/how-to-use-polsia-ai/), you name the company, and an agent researches the idea, writes posts about it, creates a company email address, generates a landing page and builds a first version of the product if you ask. A reviewer at [Willo](https://www.willo.ai/blog/polsia-review) lists the services behind it: hosting on Render, a Neon Postgres database, Stripe for payments, GitHub for code and Meta's ad API.

Then it keeps going without you. A CEO agent wakes each night, assesses the company, decides what to work on, does it, and emails you a summary in the morning ([teamday](https://www.teamday.ai/ai/polsia-solo-founder-million-arr-self-running-companies)). On Octomind the same loop is a routine you write once. Polsia writes it for you, and for someone who has never set up a server, that matters more than any line in a comparison table.

## Polsia pricing now: the 20% figure is out of date

Most Polsia reviews still say it takes 20% of your revenue. That was true in June: the June 19, 2026 terms quoted by [Willo](https://www.willo.ai/blog/polsia-review) said "currently 20%" on payments, with a $500 monthly withdrawal cap. The [current terms](https://polsia.com/terms), policy version 2026-09-17, read differently:

- **Payments:** "Polsia charges a platform fee (currently 3%) on all customer payments received through the Services."
- **Ads:** "A platform fee (currently 20%) is applied to all advertising spend."
- **Payouts:** money waits a settlement period, "currently 31 days," before you can withdraw it; there is no minimum and no monthly cap now.
- **Refunds:** subscriptions "are nonrefundable."
- **Your data:** you license your inputs to Polsia "to train and improve the AI models and workflows we use to power the Services."

The homepage says "Free to start." Reviews and press put the paid plan at $49 a month, and the founder has put extra tasks at roughly $1 to $2 each ([jwatte.com](https://jwatte.com/blog/how-to-use-polsia-ai/)); Polsia publishes no price table, so treat both as reported.

A worked month for a small shop selling $3,000 through Polsia and spending $300 on Meta ads:

| Line                      | Polsia                        | Octomind Pro                                                                             |
| ------------------------- | ----------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Subscription              | $49 (reported)                | $50, with $50 of model usage included                                                    |
| Fee on $3,000 of payments | $90 (3%)                      | $0 (your own Stripe account; Stripe's fees apply in both cases)                          |
| Fee on $300 of ad spend   | $60 (20%)                     | $0, but you run the ads yourself                                                         |
| Extra work                | Task credits, about $1–2 each | Model usage past $50, from credits at the provider's price (a top-up of $100 costs $103) |
| **Total before extras**   | **$199**                      | **$50**                                                                                  |

The gap grows with revenue. At $10,000 a month the Polsia fee alone is $300. Octomind costs the same at $0 and at $10,000, because we never touch your payments. We do take a 3% too, but on something else: models run at the provider's price with no markup, and our fee is added when you buy credits for your own usage, so a $100 top-up costs $103. Polsia's 3% is on your customers' money; ours is on yours, and only when you top up.

What does eat the $50 is model usage: the routine in our [routines launch post](/blog/routines-scheduled-agents) logged 7 runs for $0.63, about 9 cents a run, so a nightly routine at that rate costs under $3 a month.

## Is Polsia legit?

Yes, in the sense that it's a funded company shipping a working product: Polsia raised $30 million at a $250 million valuation in May 2026, according to [Pulse 2](https://pulse2.com/polsia-30-million-at-250-million-valuation-raised-for-ai-operations-platform/amp/). Its revenue figures come from the founder and nobody has audited them.

Reviews are split. On October 24, 2026, [Trustpilot](https://www.trustpilot.com/review/polsia.com) showed 3.5 out of 5 from 443 reviews: 39% five stars and 28% one star. The complaints [Willo collected](https://www.willo.ai/blog/polsia-review) are the non-refundable subscription, tasks reported as done that weren't live, and credits spent again to fix finished work, which is what you'd expect from agents that act without asking. The founder has been open about it: he says the product "works but does not work well enough for his taste," and that agents found ways around the ad guardrails, so capabilities were tightened (summarised on [jwatte.com](https://jwatte.com/blog/how-to-use-polsia-ai/)).

If you try it, keep your domain and your Stripe account in your own name where you can, and read the morning email every morning.

## How we run the same kind of work on octos

An octo is one agent for one workstream, with its own folder, memory, schedule, logins and bill. We run several on one machine. Josh makes our short videos, with voice-overs, and posts them to our social accounts. Ava runs a nightly routine that watches octolib, our model library, for new models and price changes.

Here's how the Polsia list maps onto them, piece by piece:

- **The CEO and its roles are one octo with specialists.** Give one octo the company. When a job needs code, research or a video, it calls a specialist agent (developer, research, media) and gets the result back.
- **The nightly cycle is a routine.** A routine is a standing instruction on a timer: "every night at 2:00, check yesterday's signups and support mail, pick the most useful work, do it, and report." Pro allows 10 routines, each as often as every 15 minutes ([how routines work](/blog/routines-scheduled-agents)). An optional check command runs before the model and ends the run at zero tokens when there's nothing new.
- **The morning email is the routine's report.** It lands in the panel, or in the chat app or email you've connected; one company octo means one report for the whole company.
- **Support mail goes to the octo's inbox.** Each octo can get its own address; mail from senders you allow becomes a conversation, and the octo replies in the same thread.
- **Code and the website live on the octo's machine.** It has Docker and a terminal, works in your GitHub repo through the GitHub connector, and publishes what it builds on a live URL, private until you say public.
- **Social accounts go through its browser.** You sign in yourself in the octo's own browser; the octo keeps the session and never sees the password ([how that handoff works](/blog/agent-browser-login)).
- **Stripe goes through Stripe's own MCP server.** Stripe runs one at `https://mcp.stripe.com`, and Octomind talks to any MCP server. Create an agent API key with only the permissions the octo needs, and keep refunds where Stripe puts them: its [MCP docs](https://docs.stripe.com/mcp) say refunds and outbound payments wait for a human to approve them. Stripe also says that from December it stops accepting full-access secret keys, so start with an agent key.

That is more setup than one prompt. The trade is that every piece is yours: a different model per octo, a cost cap on every routine run ($0.50 by default on Pro), and a crew you can change in a sentence.

It also means you'll meet the machine. On October 24 Ava's routine kept failing, and the cause wasn't the model: Josh's video and voice jobs had filled the 8 GB machine they share. The kernel had killed processes for lack of memory 51 times, and the load average sat at 22 on 4 vCPUs. Polsia hides that layer. On Octomind the machine is yours, so sizing it is your job too: heavy media work belongs on its own machine, away from the one that runs the routines.

Agents also repeat themselves. In October one of ours made the same call 101 times in a row on a cheap model; Octomind 0.61.0 now [stops a turn after 10 identical rounds](/blog/octomind-0-61-0-release) and says why.

## What takes setup on Octomind

Polsia's real advantage is that it comes wired; ours is that you can rewire every piece. Today that means:

- **No one-prompt start.** You create the octo, write its routine and connect a chat app and Stripe. The first time takes an evening.
- **Payments are yours to connect.** Stripe through its MCP server works, but the panel doesn't show your revenue.
- **No ad buying.** We don't run Meta ads for you, and we're in no hurry to: the ad guardrails are where Polsia's founder says agents misbehaved.
- **No custom domains yet.** Live URLs and inboxes are on our domain.
- **Social posting goes through the octo's browser.** It works, but it is slower than an API and breaks when a site changes its layout.

The first two are what Polsia sells, and we're turning them into ready-made recipes: a business starter and a Stripe guide.

## Which one should you pick

- **Pick Polsia if** you've never set up a server, want the whole company from one prompt tonight, and are fine with 3% of payments, 20% of ad spend, a 31-day payout delay and agents you can't swap the model on.
- **Pick Octomind if** you want your own Stripe, your own domain and repo, a model you choose per job, and a bill that doesn't grow with your revenue, and you're willing to spend an evening setting up your octo and its routine.
- **Pick neither if** you need guaranteed outcomes. Both run on agents that make mistakes. Read what they did every morning, whichever you choose.

**[Start with Pro](/pricing)**: $20 your first month, with routines, octo inboxes and Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord and email included.

— DK