Sabi AI: The Text-Message Executive Assistant, Explained
Sabi is an AI executive assistant you text. It is built by Inovo Studios, LLC, a small US company, and aimed squarely at one buyer: the Gen X business owner who answers email at 10pm and has never had time to learn an AI tool. The homepage promise is that if you can text a friend, you can run Sabi.
The founders are Stephen Diaz, who ran the e-commerce education business The Rainmaker Family and the AI training company AI For Companies, and Bruce van Zyl of the agency Inovo.io. Diaz’s note on the site says the product was built after his previous company grew to $55 million in sales, ranked 148th on the Inc. 5000, then ran out of money. No outside funding has been disclosed. A benchmark roster attaches a large raise to the name, but that figure belongs to an unrelated Nigerian commerce company also called Sabi.
What Sabi does
Sabi’s scope is the standard executive-assistant list, delivered over a text thread:
- Email. Triages the inbox, drafts replies in your voice from your past email, flags the two messages that need a decision, and can send on its own once you allow it.
- Calendar. Books, reschedules, protects focus time and negotiates times with leads over email.
- Follow-up. Pulls leads from the CRM or inbox and chases them on a cadence you approve.
- Content. Drafts social posts, newsletters and blog posts in your voice and can publish on a schedule.
- Numbers. Daily or weekly KPI snapshots from Stripe, QuickBooks and, since late September, your bank through Plaid.
- Meeting prep. A brief before each call with who they are and what you discussed last.
It runs a “night shift”: each night it re-reads the day’s email, calendar and calls and updates its memory, so the site says it gets sharper week over week.
You reach it by iMessage or SMS, email, Slack, a web dashboard and, since September 15, an iPhone app that adds Apple Health, Reminders and Contacts. Team seats are on the roadmap; the FAQ is explicit that it is “just you for now.”
What it connects to
The FAQ claims more than 3,000 tools. The named ones are Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Sheets, HubSpot, Salesforce, HighLevel, Stripe, QuickBooks, Slack, Zoom, Notion, Jobber, Shopify, Airtable, Asana, Trello, ClickUp and Monday, with Instantly for cold email and Plaid for bank data added in the last two weeks. The privacy policy names Composio and Pipedream as the integration layers behind that number.
One feature worth noting for anyone who also uses a chat assistant: Sabi Brain publishes everything Sabi has learned about you to Claude or ChatGPT over a connector, so those tools stop asking you to repeat yourself.
Sabi pricing
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free credits, no card | Enough to try it |
| Sabi | $295 a month | No metered cap, month to month, cancel anytime |
| Founding member | $200 a month off for the first six months | Offered “while the founder window is open”; the site says public pricing will be meaningfully higher after it closes |
The $295 retail figure comes from Sabi’s own comparison posts published September 28. The homepage FAQ still says pricing is “being finalized,” so treat the founder offers as moving. Setup, onboarding and all integrations are included, and the FAQ promises no metered traps and no per-seat surprises.
How it handles your data
This is where Sabi is most careful, and it is the argument it makes against Meta’s Muse:
- No training on your data, and the model providers it names (Anthropic, xAI and OpenAI) are on no-training terms.
- An approval rule, enforced in code, holds any email or text to a third party until you say go.
- Each specialist agent gets only the tools for its job, so an email task cannot reach your calendar or CRM.
- Data lives in the US on Supabase and DigitalOcean. Staff have no dashboard into your messages, and support access is logged.
- A SOC 2 Type 2 program is underway, with no report issued yet.
The terms are governed by Tennessee law, with liability capped at twelve months of fees.
Who Sabi is for
Sabi is a well-scoped product for a solo founder who wants one assistant, over text, with playbooks already switched on. The price says the same thing: it is competing with a part-time human EA, not with a $20 chatbot.
If you run a team, or you want the assistant to start work on its own when something happens rather than when you text, look at Carly. Carly works inside your Gmail and Outlook and sends from your address, runs workflows that start on a form submission, an inbound email or a schedule, and lets you build agents a whole team shares. Carly connects to thousands of apps. Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Get started here.
The full field is in Sabi alternatives, and the head-to-head is Carly vs Sabi.
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Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
