Caret vs Poke (Interaction Co.)

Poke is transactional breadth delivered through messaging. You text or voice-note it and it searches, drafts and sends across Gmail and Outlook with label management and real-time sync, schedules events, sets reminders, and fires proactive background automations — Poke Recipes is the layering for integrations and shared setups. Since June 2026 you can claim a @poke.com address and route your primary email through it, and since June 2026 Ultra can build and deploy websites at yourname.poke.com. Per the 2026-07-23 news, Poke is joining Cognition and works exactly as before. The 2026-06-25 update added Poke Human — real people for reservations, phone calls, orders and ride booking — inside Ultra.

Caret attacks one verb: writing. It runs in the background, reads your screen across apps, keeps a persistent memory of your style, and shows grey inline completions you commit with Tab. The differentiators are cross-app context transfer (email context into a message) and local-first processing with offline usage. There is no chat window and no prompt box — a deliberate choice — and no integrations are listed. Poke is broad and outward-facing; Caret is narrow, local and cursor-level.

Poke is freemium: a free entry point with a paid Ultra tier at $199/mo billed monthly. That number is the whole decision. The free tier covers the messaging-assistant basics — threaded email, calendar and reminders — while Ultra is where frontier intelligence on every action, website building at yourname.poke.com and Poke Human (real people handling reservations, calls and orders) sit. The vendor's own not-for list flags casual users whose real-world task volume won't justify Ultra, which is an unusually honest framing: Ultra is a volume-and-convenience purchase, not a capability gate for email and calendar.

Caret is listed as paid with no free tier and no plan price in the provided data, so treat it as a straight subscription you evaluate against how many hours a day you type. Its economics are simpler to model: one macOS 26+ seat, local-first processing, no seat-admin or centralised billing offered — so the cost lands on individuals, not teams. Comparing them on price is mostly comparing commitment: Poke lets you start free and escalate to a $199/mo decision; Caret asks for payment up front and gives you one narrow, fast behaviour in return.