Double AI: The EA Service and What It Costs in 2026
Double is a virtual executive assistant service, not an AI product with a human support team bolted on. You get a named, dedicated assistant, matched to you within a few business days, who works part-time on your inbox, calendar, travel, research, and events. The AI part is a layer on top of that relationship rather than a replacement for it.
The company was founded in 2018 by Alice Default, who came out of Sunrise Calendar before Microsoft bought it, and runs out of Brooklyn. Its AI delegation tool, Mingo, captures a request, summarizes the important details, and suggests next steps so the human assistant moves faster and misses less.
That framing matters, because “double ai” turns up a lot of searches from people expecting software pricing. It is not software pricing.
What Double costs
Four plans, billed monthly with no long-term contract, each including a set number of assistant hours:
| Plan | Price | Hours included | Effective hourly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $549/mo | 10 | ~$55 |
| Grow | $999/mo | 20 | ~$50 |
| Build | $1,899/mo | 40 | ~$47 |
| Scale | $2,799/mo | 60 | ~$47 |
Every plan includes the dedicated assistant, a free consultation call, a 1-1 onboarding session, access to Mingo, and the ability to buy extra hours. Moving up the tiers buys faster matching, a dedicated customer success manager, hour-sharing across multiple executives, and guaranteed coverage when your assistant is away. Build adds perks like a 1Password vault.
The pricing is refreshingly public for this category, where most competitors make you book a call to hear a number.
Who the maths works for
At roughly $50 an hour with no employment overhead, no recruiting, and no management burden, Double is priced sensibly against hiring. A full-time EA in a US metro costs multiples of the Starter plan once you count benefits and the months you spend hiring.
So the honest answer is that Double is good value if the work genuinely needs a person. That means judgement, relationships, and things that happen outside your software: negotiating with a vendor, chasing a supplier by phone, handling a personal errand, managing a house move, sitting on hold with an airline, exercising taste about which of two bad options you would prefer.
Where the maths gets harder is the other half of most executives’ delegation list. Triaging an inbox. Finding a time that works across four calendars. Sending the follow-up you promised. Chasing the three people who have not replied. Turning a meeting into tasks. Booking the recurring check-in. That work is high-volume, low-judgement, and it is what most of those 10 hours quietly go on.
The 10-hour ceiling
Starter’s constraint is not the price, it is the 10 hours. That is about two hours a week. An inbox that receives 80 messages a day will absorb it before your assistant touches anything else, which is why people describe outgrowing Starter within a quarter and why the “purchase additional hours as needed” line appears on all four tiers.
The category’s structural issue is that assistant time is linear. Twice the delegation costs twice as much, forever. Software does not price that way.
Where Carly fits
Carly is an AI agent with its own real email address that does the high-volume, low-judgement half of that list, from $35 a month rather than $549.
You forward it a thread and it handles the thread. It reads your mailbox and holds your calendar, so “find 45 minutes with Michael and Claire next week and send the invite” is a sentence, not a task you assign and then follow up on. It triages overnight, chases the people who have not replied, turns meetings into tasks, and keeps the CRM current, across thousands of apps. It does not run out of hours in the third week of the month.
Pricing: Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month
The comparison is not really Carly against Double, though. It is that most people buying a 10-hour plan are spending most of those hours on work that does not need a human at all. Put the scheduling, triage, and follow-up on an agent, and the human hours you do buy go to the things a person is genuinely better at. Plenty of people run both, and at $35 against $549 that is an easy budget conversation.
If your delegation list is mostly phone calls, personal errands, and judgement, Double is the better buy and Carly is not what you want. Book a call if you want help working out which half of your list is which.
FAQ
What is Double? A virtual executive assistant service that pairs you with a dedicated human assistant, supported by an AI delegation tool called Mingo. It was founded in 2018 by Alice Default, formerly of Sunrise Calendar.
How much does Double cost? Starter is $549/month for 10 hours, Grow $999 for 20, Build $1,899 for 40, and Scale $2,799 for 60. There are no long-term contracts, and extra hours can be purchased on any plan.
Is Double an AI assistant? Not really. The assistant is a person. Mingo is an AI layer that captures requests, summarizes them, and suggests next steps so the human works faster.
What is Mingo? Double’s AI delegation tool. It confirms a request has been fully captured, pulls out the key details, and proposes next steps for the assistant handling it.
What is the cheapest way to delegate inbox and scheduling work? An AI agent handles the high-volume, low-judgement part, which is most of it. Carly starts at $35/month against Double’s $549 entry plan, and the two are often run together.
More: Double alternatives · Virtual executive assistant · Best AI personal assistants
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