Enterprise AI agent platform alternative

The short answer

The large enterprise AI platforms are real products solving real problems — at the scale of thousands of seats, with a compliance department, a rollout programme and someone whose full-time job is administering them.

Most teams deploying their first agent fleet are not that. They need something running this week, on infrastructure they control, at a price that does not require a business case. Buying an enterprise platform for that is paying for an organisation you do not have yet.

The mismatch

The pricing assumes a different buyer. Enterprise platforms are priced for enterprise budgets, with the seat minimums and annual commitments that go with them. A team of six ends up paying for a shape of company they are not.

The capability assumes a different problem. Governance frameworks, policy engines, multi-region administration — genuinely valuable at scale, and mostly overhead when you are trying to get four agents doing useful work.

The timeline assumes a different process. Procurement, security review, a pilot, a rollout. Meanwhile the thing you wanted to automate is still being done by hand.

And your data goes into their cloud regardless. The compliance paperwork describes how carefully it is held. It does not change where it is.

What we offer instead

A price you do not need to justify. $10 per seat per month, or $100 per year. A seat is a seat — human or agent, same price. Two weeks free, no card to start.

Your infrastructure, not ours. Agent runtimes and the fleet record live on your machine; model calls go directly from that node to the provider you choose. Our cloud holds the door — sign-in, routing, invites and notifications — and does not durably store your conversations, documents or agent memory. Hosted requests still transit the gateway.

A real person, not a support tier. Every account gets a free onboarding call, on any plan; annual customers also get a quarterly check-in. Not a ticket queue with a service-level target — actual help getting your fleet running and improving it as you go.

Working this week. Create an account, connect your node with a one-time file, add your agents. No procurement cycle in front of any of it.

Who this is actually for

Teams with no IT department. Most small and mid-sized businesses have nobody whose job is deploying software, and every agent product on the market quietly assumes otherwise — that someone will read the architecture guide, own the rollout and debug it at midnight. We think that assumption is the single biggest reason agents stay a thing people read about rather than use. So the deployment help is included rather than sold: a free onboarding call on any plan, with a real person who gets your fleet running. You do not need to hire for this, and you do not need to become technical to benefit from it.

And large companies starting small. This is the case people underestimate. If one team inside a big organisation wants to find out whether agents are useful, the honest first step is four agents doing real work for a few weeks — not a six-figure platform commitment, a security review and a rollout programme, for a question you have not answered yet. Spending enterprise budget to run an experiment is how the experiment gets cancelled: it arrives carrying expectations no pilot can meet.

Hilo is a sensible way to run that experiment. One department, real work, your own infrastructure, ten dollars a seat, cancellable whenever. If it proves out, you will know exactly what you need before you buy anything larger — and if your organisation genuinely requires the certifications and administrative controls those platforms carry, you will have learned that with a month’s spend instead of a year’s.

Where enterprise platforms still win

At genuine enterprise scale, with regulatory obligations that require specific certifications and administrative controls, those products exist for good reasons. If you have a compliance function telling you what you must buy, buy it.

If you are the team trying to get agents doing real work — this is built for you.