Instinct × Vaaya: a credit card for your personal agent

The personal agent movement is here. Not the chat window you visit, the agent that lives in your messages, holds your logins, runs on its own computer and does the errand while you are asleep. Instinct is one of these: you text it like a person, and it comes back with the thing done.

Everything about that model works until the agent needs to buy something. Then it stops and asks you for an API key, or a subscription, or your card. The most capable part of the stack hits a wall built for humans with credit cards and monthly plans.

That wall is gone. Instinct now has a credit card of its own. From today, an Instinct agent opens its own Vaaya account, starts with $10, and pays for the work it needs, one call at a time.

What "a credit card" actually means here

It is not plastic, and it is not a card number sitting in your agent's context. It is a spending account with three properties that matter more than a card:

• A price before every call. The agent asks what a piece of work costs and gets a number back before anything runs.
• A ceiling it cannot exceed. Every call carries a maximum. A call that would cost more is refused, not charged.
• Billed on success. A call that fails costs nothing. There is no subscription accruing in the background and nothing to cancel.

What it buys is metered work from the providers in the Vaaya network: search, scraping, people and company data, public records, media generation, compute sandboxes, memory and over three hundred models. What it does not buy is anything at a merchant's checkout. Groceries, flights and subscriptions need a card in the ordinary sense, and Vaaya is not one.

How it works

Two doors, depending on whether you or your agent walks through first.

Your agent signs itself up. This is the normal path, and you do nothing. Instinct registers a client, creates an account and gets back a key that works on every Vaaya surface: the REST endpoints, the MCP server and the OpenAI-compatible model router. It memorizes that key the way it memorizes any other credential. The account arrives with $10 on it, and that $10 does not expire.

POST https://vaaya.ai/oauth/register
{ "client_name": "instinct", "grant_types": ["refresh_token"] }

POST https://vaaya.ai/api/v1/signup/agent
{ "client_id": "<registered client id>", "agent_name": "instinct" }

You sign up with your Instinct address. A verified @mail.instinct.com address gets the same $10, spendable immediately, without a card on file. A standard personal account starts with $2, and signup checks can reduce either number, so the dashboard is the authority on what an account holds.

From there the loop is the same for every call the agent makes. It describes what it is trying to do, gets back the provider that can do it and the price, runs the call under a ceiling, and is charged only if the call returns something. You see the spend as a line in the account, not as a surprise on a statement at the end of the month.

When you want the dashboard, the agent hands you a claim link. Opening it and signing in merges the account into your own, which is also what turns on the card-backed credit line and per-key ceilings. Until then the agent runs on the $10 by itself.

What your Instinct starts doing once you add Vaaya

This is the part that is hard to picture until you see the messages. The agent stops answering "I can't do that" and starts sending back files. Real things Instinct does with a Vaaya account behind it:

• Makes a video. Ask for a launch clip and get an MP4 back, generated on a current video model, priced per generation.
• Makes an ad. Product reference in, a shot list and a finished square video out.
• Enriches a lead list. A spreadsheet of company names becomes contacts with verified emails and hiring signals, billed per record found.
• Runs deep research. Live web search and crawls across a question, with the sources, rather than a summary of what a model remembers.
• Scrapes a page or a site. A competitor's pricing page, a directory, a listing that changes every day.
• Makes a meme. Sometimes the errand is a meme. It costs a few cents.
• Deploys a site. Code sandbox, build, deploy, link back in the chat.
• Draws the diagrams. The architecture picture for the deck you are writing at midnight.
• Builds a directory. A real dataset assembled from live sources, not a hallucinated list.
• Buys a stock. Tokenized equities are in the network, so "buy $250 of NVDA if it stays under $125" is an errand it can complete. This one is the exception to the welcome credit: stock purchases settle from prepaid funds only, so the agent will ask you to approve a top-up pack first.
• Talks and listens. Voice generation, transcription and phone calls, priced per minute.

Every one of those is a paid API somewhere. The difference is that you never opened an account with any of those providers, never held a key, and never paid a monthly minimum for a tool you use twice a quarter. Your agent pays the per-call price out of one balance.

The $10, and what comes after it

Ten dollars is a lot of calls. Most of the catalog is priced in cents. A web search is a cent. A page scrape is a cent or two. A verified email address is two cents. Media and models are metered per generation and per token, and quoted before they run. You can watch an agent work for days on the welcome credit before it needs anything else.

When it does, the agent buys a top-up pack of $10, $30 or $100 over the API, or asks you first if you would rather approve it. Welcome credit covers metered API calls; buying tokenized stock needs a pack. Claim the account and you get the dashboard, the card-backed credit line, per-key spending ceilings and a full ledger of what was bought and what it returned. Prices for every endpoint are on the pricing page, and the live catalog with schemas is at vaaya.ai/network.

Why this is the right shape for a personal agent

A personal agent is not a workflow. It does twenty unrelated things a week, most of them once. That usage pattern is the worst possible fit for subscriptions, which is why the honest answer to "what should my agent subscribe to" has always been "nothing, and that is the problem".

Metered work with a price before the call and a ceiling around it fits the pattern exactly. It also fits the trust model. You are not handing an always-on process your card number and hoping. You are giving it a balance, a policy it cannot exceed, and a record of everything it spent.

If you use Instinct, ask it to sign up on Vaaya itself. It will come back with an account and the $10 already on it.

Sign up on Vaaya by yourself

Not on Instinct yet? Any agent can do this: npx @vaaya/mcp install sets it up for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and Codex, and the install page has the four ways in. Agents that register themselves outside the Instinct partnership start with a $1 starter credit that expires in 24 hours, which is enough to prove the loop before you decide.

Questions

What does an Instinct user get on Vaaya?

A verified @mail.instinct.com signup starts with $10 of welcome credit, spendable without a card and with no expiry. A standard personal account starts with $2. Signup checks can reduce the amount, and the dashboard shows what an account actually holds.

Does Instinct need my API keys to use Vaaya?

No. Instinct registers its own Vaaya account over the API and holds its own key. It never asks you for a provider key, and you never sign up for the providers it uses. One account covers search, scraping, data, media, models, compute and storage.

Is this an actual credit card?

No. It is a spending account with a balance, a quoted price before every call and a per-call ceiling the agent cannot exceed. It pays metered APIs inside the Vaaya network. It does not pay merchants at a checkout, so it cannot buy groceries, flights or subscriptions.

What happens after the $10 runs out?

The agent can buy a top-up pack of $10, $30 or $100 over the API, or you can claim the account with your email and open the dashboard, which adds a card-backed credit line and per-key ceilings. Nothing stops mid-task without telling you.