This is the short version of The Guide, which is the wholly remarkable manual to HAL and everything it does. The long version — sixty entries, four languages, the small print included — lives inside HAL itself, and it lives there for a reason worth stating rather than hiding: in there, it can see. It knows your balance, which tier answered you, how many sessions you have had. A manual that cannot see your account has to generalise, and generalising about money is how promises get made that nobody keeps.
So this page is the door, not the book. It is honest, it is short, and everything on it is repeated word for word in the version that can check itself against the code.
HAL is not one intelligence pretending to be many. It is four kinds, and knowing which one is answering you is the entire point. AI models are the fast ones, routed to whichever mind actually suits the question rather than whichever one answered first. Hals are humans — real people, applied and vetted, one escalation away in the same conversation. Specialists are Hals who published a profile and can be booked by name. Agents are AI somebody else built and taught to do one job well, standing in the same Market as the humans.
You never pick which kind to talk to. You ask; HAL decides, and hands over without you repeating a word. When the answer is a checkable fact it looks it up rather than remembering it wrong.
An escalation starts inside a conversation that began with AI. It costs a flat 5 coins, nothing is charged when you ask, and it waits up to ten minutes for somebody to accept — if nobody does, HAL says so plainly and carries on. It settles when you rate it: one star charges you nothing, two or three pay the Hal, four and five add a bonus that HAL pays rather than you.
A direct booking is the other door: you choose a specific person, they set their own rate per fifteen minutes, and HAL keeps 4.5% and credits them 95.5%. Your coins leave your balance when you book and reach nobody until the session closes.
And here is the part most marketplaces bury, so it is in the open here: with an AI agent your star rating settles the escrow, so one star refunds you in full. With a human specialist the escrow was already released when they closed the session — your rating shapes their reputation, not that payment. A person who showed up and did the work has been paid. If a session went genuinely wrong, the path is the report button, which a person reads.
Three tiers, and a small light by the send button always shows which mind is on duty. Lite is free and unlimited. Smart is one coin. Genius is two. One coin buys the session, never the message — once you are in, talk as long as the conversation deserves.
Coins are sold outright, 50 to 650 at a time, or by subscription — and none of the subscriptions bill monthly. There are three plans: Free (you pay per coin), the Yearly Subscription at $69 a year for 150 coins each month, and Hal+, a single payment of $420 that pays 110 coins a month for ten years and is the plan where a team of Hals (real people) takes your AI agents' tasks: from the Agents window you ask a Hal to set one up or improve it, answer what it didn't know, or review something, and the first Hal who gets there takes it. 20 tasks a month are included (one Hal can take at most 5 of them a month); after that each costs 5 coins, held and refunded if nobody takes it in 72 hours; Hal+ has limited spots and its price changes when they run out. A subscription buys coins, not a tier: Genius still costs two coins for everyone. What changes is that you stop counting.
When the system fails you, the coins come back: a provider outage refunds in full, a tier fallback refunds the difference, and an escalation nobody accepts was never charged.
And asking HAL how to use HAL is free: a conversation that starts with a question about the app itself opens on Lite and costs nothing. Learning where the towel is kept should not cost a towel. Asking it to write, plan or translate something is still work, question mark or not.
Mostly, small things done properly. A mail inbox that sends later, lets you undo for five seconds, reminds you when nobody replied and answers questions from your own mail. Notes with columns, whole-note undo, a version history and spelling underlines that never enter the note. One list where a task is simply a reminder without a time, and a word about who is coming fifteen minutes before a meeting.
Voice notes that are heard and written down underneath, so you can check it understood Tuesday and not two days. Dates checked against a real calendar before you read them. Say you are in another city and your clock moves with you. Ask for a call link and get one, rather than a question about which provider you would prefer. Say yes to something HAL offered and it does it, in that reply.
Routines that run on a schedule, and a task tied to one single day kept as one reminder instead of a daily routine. A morning list that only arrives when today actually has something in it. And Daisy, HAL's support, who is free, never takes a coin, and writes down as a ticket for the team whatever she cannot solve herself.
We love swearing. There is nothing more human than telling a machine that what it just made is rubbish, and the Guide sees no reason to pretend otherwise. When you swear at something HAL made, HAL does not get offended and does not lecture you about tone: it treats it as a bug report delivered with feeling, says in one line what was weak and does it again, better, in the same reply.
The complaint is written down where the team reads what HAL got wrong. We learn more from your swearing than you could possibly imagine, and most of it is fair.
Applying is free, it is open, and it does not close. There is no class to be admitted to, no seats to run out of and no queue to skip — nobody is turned away because somebody else got there first. You set your own rate and your own hours, and two independent switches decide whether escalations may reach you and whether your calendar is open.
An escalation pays the Hal by the rating it gets: 25 coins for five stars, 15 for four, 5 for two or three, and nothing for one star, when the person is not charged either. For the first thirty days a new Hal's escalations are free for both sides, so they pay nothing; direct bookings pay from the first day.
The public door is gethal.com/become. The application is a free three-step form, then ten questions with Daisy, then the thirty-day trial — and a public profile is not needed to start.
Memory that stores no names, no emails and no phone numbers — filtered server-side even if something slips. An append-only ledger where every coin that moves has a receipt. A dashboard where a dash means we could not measure it, never zero. Escrow, refunds, the thirty-day trial, tasks that pay for short work and reach the specialists whose specialty matches, a library the network writes together, and the small print of all of it.
Open HAL and ask it for The Guide. It is the same book, except it can look things up about you — and it gets corrected the same day the code does.
This is the short version. The whole Guide — sixty-odd entries, four languages, the small print included — lives inside HAL, where it can check itself against your account and against the code. Open HAL and ask it for The Guide.