Mela vs Poke (Interaction Co.)

These products do not overlap on a single feature. Poke is an assistant living inside your messaging apps — Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram, and RCS — where you text or voice-message tasks and it handles email (search, draft, send, labels, inbox organization for Gmail and Outlook), schedules calendar events, sets reminders, and runs proactive background automations. Poke Recipes lets you build and share integrations and automations; Poke Kitchen is aimed at developers writing custom integrations. It also does web search with verified sources, generates tables and charts from data or images, handles PDF generation and editing with LaTeX, and Ultra adds website building at yourname.poke.com. Connections span Notion, Oura, Gmail, Outlook, TripIt, Granola, Todoist, and PostHog. Notably, Poke now offers @poke.com email addresses, and Poke Human (Ultra) brings real people into tasks like reservations and phone calls.

Mela does one job well: getting recipes into a collection you cook from. An in-app browser shows a live preview the moment it detects a recipe, a sharing extension captures recipes from other apps, and text recognition scans physical cookbooks. It doubles as a limited RSS reader — give it a blog address and it finds feeds and pulls extractable recipes into a Feeds inbox. The native viewer, full-screen cook mode with enlarged type and dimmed inactive steps, tap-to-check ingredients, multiple timers, and multi-recipe menus are all built around cooking. Meal-plan entries live in Calendar and groceries in Reminders, with iCloud syncing recipes, bookmarks, and subscriptions. The pitches are opposite: Poke replaces apps via chat; Mela is a focused app you open on purpose.

Poke is freemium: a free tier covers the core assistant, with Poke Ultra as the paid tier. Ultra is where the newer, heavier capabilities sit — frontier intelligence for every action, website building at yourname.poke.com, and (as of June 2026) Poke Human, which pulls in real people for tasks like restaurant reservations, phone calls, and ordering. If your usage is email, calendar, reminders, and light automations, the free tier is likely enough; Ultra only makes sense if you want the agentic extras or human-in-the-loop tasks. Mela is a straight paid app — no subscription, no account, no cloud service of its own, and no data collection, with iCloud handling sync. That's a one-time purchase against Poke's ongoing freemium-to-Ultra funnel. The cost structures aren't comparable because the value is: Poke's tier gates assistance capacity and human tasks, while Mela's price buys a self-contained tool that stores everything in your existing Apple account. Neither pricing page tells you which to buy — your task does.