UPDATE: It appears Fin is out of business. Please consider one of these alternatives or see below. If you own this listing or this information is incorrect, contact me here.
Fin is a 24/7 personal assistance service available when you need it on the other end of your phone. “You use it like Siri, Echo, or Google Now… except it actually works,” their developers said.
Fin uses a combination of machine and human intelligence to find answers, send messages, handle bookings, and take care of anything you’d expect from a personal assistant.
The company has been in business since 2015 and their staff are based in San Francisco, California.
Table of Contents
About Fin
The company was founded by Andrew Kortina and Sam Lessin, and to-date they operate with less than 50 employees.
Their target customers are professional or regular people who can benefit from an assistant to help them manage some of their workload.
The benefit of using Fin over hiring a personal assistant is that you have assistance on-hand 24/7. All you need is an Internet connection and a smartphone, two things most people are never without.
How Fin Assistant Works
Fin uses a combination of humans and AI, and as a result they say their app is, “more accurate, powerful, and better able to handle real nuance and complexity,” than the other AI assistants such as Google Now, Siri, and Echo.
They also say their smart technology improves as it gets to know you better over time. Giving you a personal experience, customized experience, not a general AI experience.
You can delegate to your Fin assistant via email, SMS, iOS, or the web.
Services
Fin specializes in providing 24/7 assistance through their smartphone app. All you need is an Internet connection and you have a combination of artificial and human support on hand.
The services are only really limited by your imagination and needs. You can ask Fin to call, email, text, schedule, book, and make purchases for you.
You can use Fin to transcribe documents, perform online research, or just find answers for those questions you need answering there and then.
Some examples of common requests Fin is used to handling are:
- Fin, can you take care of this hospital bill for me? Use my Amex.
- Please remember Cotogna as a place I can get dinner after 10pm.
- I am going to New York next week. Can you lookup the people I said I wanted to spend more time with?
- Can you unsubscribe me from these mailings (see pic attached)?
As you can see from the above, Fin is best used for tasks that save you time or make sure you don’t forget important appointments, just like a PA would.
Fin can also handle recurring requests with their Recurring Request Dashboard and sends users a consolidated daily executive summary of all work completed and requests in progress.
The Human Touch
Fin has added inbound call answering by having customers forward their work number to have a Fin assistant pick up (instead of voicemail) and using this as a reception desk for their businesses.
They also offer weekly live phone calls to let you braindump and delegate everything you need help with for the week. Your assistant will also proactively look at your calendar and suggest things they can take off your plate.
And if you spend most of your day in Slack, you can send requests to Fin via Slack as well.
Plans and Pricing
Fin currently has two pricing plans. You can get started and try the service for just $20 per month, or for $270 per month you can have access to all their services. (Though when I signed up, the $20 disappeared and let me register for free.)
Since the service is on-demand, presumably the only advantage of signing up for the higher level plans is the bonus credit that’s included.
It’s unclear whether or not your unused credit rolls over to the next month.
Each plan includes:
- 24/7 human-backed assistance
- Chat with Fin via iOS
- Friends can email your Fin assistant too
- Voice and image transcription
- Integration with Google calendar
- Handle booking, meal, and travel plans
- Carry out research
- Make purchases
- Draft emails and documents
Different requests will burn through different amounts of credit, though the company gives the guideline that most requests are in the $8-30 range.
They list some specific examples of what certain requests might cost, based on the complexity and human time involvement required:
Your first request (up to $30) is free, and you can cancel anytime by simply telling Fin you wish to cancel.
Fin Alternatives
It feels like this kind of personal assistant service is starting to gain some momentum and I expect more companies to enter the space.
As for right now, Magic is their main competitor and worth taking a look at. You can do a lot of the same tasks with Magic, though Magic also only interacts via text message. Please.Do might be worth a look as well.
Another alternative to consider are task-based services like Fancy Hands (team-based) or OkayRelax (dedicated).
Your Turn
Have you used Fin? If so, please leave a review below to help others with their decision.
Charged $55 to book a car rental at a major airport. Task log reported that assistant went to Kayak.com and searched for car rentals – no excuse for billing more than 10-15 minutes on a task like this. Charged $12.50 for a canceled task of “submit expenses” that generated 3 gibberish emails and no useful work. Call forwarding generating an error message to callers and hanging up. Too expensive, not useful enough. Should have read these reviews before wasting my money. Check back with me when this product is mature and efficient enough to be worth the exorbitant fees.
Fin just charged me $62 to book a dentist appointment. That’s more than the appointment is going to cost me…don’t trust the estimates AT ALL. They are there to get you interested in using the service, and they will always be double or more. One of my tasks was charged at 5 TIMES the high end of the estimate. I don’t trust this company. Also, if you set up your account on a phone, you will be asked which kinds of services you are interested in, but you aren’t able to proceed in the interface to give any info about when, how, passwords, etc…and each ‘interest’ is a request that is initiated immediately. This is absolutely backward. Fin charged me $18 for getting a ‘restock my groceries’ request without any execution on the task because the interface didn’t advance to allow me to put in a password for the account I wanted Fin to have access to. I canceled the request when I realized the task had been initiated in my account set up which is very weird to begin with…this is a manipulative attempt on the company’s part to ensure users are activating requests immediately…probably because of investor’s need to see high involvement and interest. Stay away from Fin until the company establishes a more client-focused quality control system.
Fin is the lifesaver I’ve been looking for! As someone who works a full-time plus two part-time jobs, I’ve been searching for a scalable solution to help with my administrative tasks.
I was really excited when one of my friends suggested this service to me. I am a startup founder living in San Francisco. I needed someone to help manage administrative tasks like scheduling meetings, processing expenses, and some personal stuff too. Fin has been a game changer for me. Way more flexible than a real assistant and the quality has been great. There were a few times where I had to reply back to Fin to specify how I wanted something done but other than that it’s been pretty seamless and easy to use.
Absolutely terrible! Fin is extremely inefficient and overpriced. If you use their service, be prepared to pay egregious amounts of money for subpar work. You’re literally paying for them to develop their product. I reached out to my account manager to discuss the charge and I’ve received no response. Stay away!
I asked to book an eye appointment. After about an hour I logged in to see if anyone had responded because I didn’t receive a text. I was STILL being charged — up to $50 when I finally said just cancel the request. There doesn’t seem to be any accountability here, despite them saying they’ve “lowered their prices and increase quality”
Contacts harvested – got a marketing e-mail from them today despite never having used their service (or heard of it). When I inquired with the company, they said someone who has my contact information shared it with them so they could take full advantage of Fin’s services.
So basically what they told me is that they’re using client data in ways they didn’t authorize to find more clients.
Almost 90 minutes spent today researching one flight option and making two phone calls. Also took 12 hours to have conversation back and forth to get the answers I needed. Really, really disappointing.
Two tasks 60+
Task 1. Email to book an appointment 46 min
Task 2. 1 email to book one appointment 16 min
Feel Robbed.
Asking for way too much money.
OVERPRICED!!!!! There is NO ACCOUNTABILITY for their work or the ridiculous number of minutes they charge. They were helpful with certain tasks but there is no way it took 15 minutes to make one phone call. They claim to have visited over 1000 websites during the one month of services but I agree with David, WE ARE FUNDING THEIR DEVELOPMENT with no recourse.
I was very excited by this service. Have been looking for an asst without needing to hire someone full time. However, my first task assignment- make a dentist appt and add it to my calendar I was charged 32 minutes for. This would’ve taken me 5 minutes to do. I spoke to a representative because I was shocked by this calculation. She that said part of the time is that Fin is learning and storing information (my insurance, my dentist, etc.). Ok, but isn’t the point of it being AI that it can do tasks like this automatically? Even if you were going to charge a per minute fee for adding a contact card or writing a note, it would be less than 5 minutes.
I cancelled my account. Maybe once it becomes more AI/less person the cost will go down?
I was charged 62 minutes — 25 minutes to make a phone call that would have taken me 5 minutes (to make an appointment) and the rest to find a place and order a cake. For the cake request, I had to correct them a few times. I can see how $1/minute is an okay price *if* their assistants were efficient. I’m cancelling my account.
As of 10/17 Fin is still a work in progress. My experience here is they are trying to get their Ai working, but currently, it is not efficient at all and while it tries to get efficient, you are getting billed. So at $60 and hour, you are basically funding their development. Specifically, I had two items to add to a google calendar, not contacts to look up, nothing more than adding two school events to my calendar, I was charged 23 minutes of work. I put in a request to have that request reviewed and I was given 2 minutes credit. 21 minutes to enter two items on a google calendar.
You can make your own choice, my advice would be to spend your money elsewhere.