Runtime vs Town: AI Assistants vs Fintech Agent Ops

Feature	Runtime	Town
What it is	Agent harness for payment and fintech teams	Personal AI assistant for each person
Setup	Days, with a forward-deployed engineer	Learns from your existing work
Primary job	Team operations on payment data	Email, calendar, meetings, follow-ups
Its own identity	Agents called from Slack, Teams, email, SMS, voice	Each Townie has a @town.com email
Where it runs	Your AWS, GCP, Azure, or self-hosted	US-hosted on Convex and AWS
Bring your own models	Any model, including open-weight	Not published
Isolated computer per agent	Yes: browser, terminal, files	Not published
Approvals on money movement	Built in, before any payout or ledger entry	Approval before emails and invites
Public self-serve pricing	Free, Teams from $99/seat	Free to $199/month

Town and Runtime at a glance

Town is a personal AI assistant. Everyone in Town gets a Townie, an assistant with its own town.com email address, that learns how you work from the tools you already use: email, calendar, Slack, docs, and more than 50 integrations including Gmail, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Stripe. Townies keep a profile of how you work, take items off your to-do list, run routines such as morning briefings, inbox management, and meeting prep, and suggest repetitive work they could take over. Town Teams lets Townies work together across a team with shared integrations and routines. Town was founded by Jean-Denis Grézé, formerly CTO of Plaid, and Tony Vincent, and raised a $55M Series A led by a16z in June 2026. It is for busy professionals who want a capable assistant without writing prompts.

Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. Payment ops, risk, compliance, finance, underwriting, onboarding, and support build agents from their SOPs. Each agent works on its own isolated computer in your cloud, reaches your ledger, processor, and bank portals through APIs, databases, MCP servers, and a browser, and stops for a person before anything moves money. It is for operations leaders who want many governed agents running the work of their teams.

Good products, different jobs.

How they differ

Your work vs your team's queue

Town's strength is that it learns you: your clients, deadlines, relationships, and the way you write, then drafts in your voice. The unit is the person and their inbox, calendar, and to-do list.

Payment operations run on queues, not inboxes. A single stuck payment touches four teams: support gets the ticket, payment ops traces it, finance sees a recon break, and risk or compliance may review it. Today each team investigates it separately in different tools. On Runtime it is one investigation with one record, and every run adds to the organization's memory of resolved tickets, fraud caught, and reconciliation edge cases.

Where it runs and who holds the data

Town publishes a solid security baseline: SOC 2 Type II, encryption in transit and at rest, no training on your data unless you opt in, and US hosting on Convex and AWS. It is a hosted service.

Runtime runs agent computers in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account, or you self-host the whole platform with Helm, and you can bring your own sandbox provider. Credentials are masked, and card numbers and SSNs are stripped from prompts and logs. For teams with PCI scope or a sponsor bank reviewing their controls, that difference usually decides the question.

Models and harnesses

Town does not publish which models it uses or a way to bring your own. Runtime lets you use any model, including open-weight models served in your cloud for PCI and PII work, with harness routing (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode), model routing, and fallbacks when a provider goes down.

Depth on money movement

Town never sends emails or calendar invites without your approval, which is the right control for an assistant. Runtime's controls are built around money: agents start read-only, and approvals sit in front of releasing a payout, applying a reserve, booking a ledger entry, or replying to a sponsor bank. Every run is recorded end to end, including the trigger, every query and tool call, approvals, cost, and result, ready to export for an auditor or examiner.

Self-serve vs a forward-deployed engineer

Town is designed to need no setup at all. Runtime pairs you with a forward-deployed AI engineer whose team built payment and fintech infrastructure at Hulu's payments team at Disney, Finix, Modern Treasury, and BlackRock. The FDE maps your processes, builds the first agents with your team, sets up guardrails, and trains your admins, so your people keep running it after the FDE leaves.

Where Town is stronger

Zero setup. It learns from work you have already done, with no prompts to write.
Personal context. A persistent profile of your voice, relationships, and routines.
Its own email address. Each Townie has a town.com address and can coordinate with other people's Townies.
Everyday assistant routines. Briefings, inbox management, meeting prep, and relationship tracking out of the box.
Public, low entry pricing. A free plan and paid plans from $15 per month.

Pricing

Town publishes its pricing. Free ($0, 30 chat messages per month), Starter ($15 per month), Pro ($49 per month billed annually), Power ($99 per month billed annually), and Power Plus ($199 per month billed annually), each with a monthly credit allowance. Team and Team Plus plans pool credits across unlimited seats, and Enterprise is custom.

Runtime has a Free tier ($0, one session), Teams from $99 per seat per month, and Enterprise with custom pricing and self-hosting. Teams usually weigh it against the work of analysts they were about to hire. Rain replaced $250k in vendor spend with Runtime.

Which should you choose

Choose Town if

You want a personal assistant for email, calendar, meetings, and follow-ups
You want it to learn your style without setup
The data involved is everyday business communication, not card data or ledgers
Self-serve pricing per person fits your budget

Choose Runtime if

Agents need to work card data, PII, ledgers, or payouts
Agent computers and models have to run in your cloud
You need approvals before money moves and a run record your sponsor bank will accept
Several teams touch the same transaction and should share one investigation
You want an engineer who has built payment infrastructure to get the first agents live

The two can sit side by side: Town for each person's day, Runtime for the operations that touch money.

See Runtime on your busiest queue

Bring one SOP. A forward-deployed AI engineer builds the first agent with your team, inside your cloud.

Book a demo

Frequently asked questions

What is Town?

Town is a personal AI assistant. Each user gets a Townie with its own town.com email address that learns how you work from your email, calendar, Slack, docs, and other tools, keeps a profile of how you work, and handles to-dos, routines like morning briefings and meeting prep, and follow-ups.

Who founded Town?

Town was founded by Jean-Denis Grézé, formerly CTO of Plaid, and Tony Vincent, formerly of Google AI. It raised a $55M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in June 2026, when it opened its assistant to everyone.

Is Town secure enough for fintech data?

Town says it is SOC 2 Type II compliant, encrypts data in transit and at rest, does not train on your data without opt-in, and is US-hosted on Convex and AWS. For agents that touch card data, PII, ledgers, and payouts, many fintech teams also need the agents to run in their own cloud, on models they choose, with approvals before money moves. That is what Runtime is built for.

How much does Town cost?

Town has a free plan and paid individual plans from $15 per month (Starter) to $199 per month (Power Plus, billed annually), plus Team, Team Plus, and custom Enterprise plans. Runtime has a free tier, Teams from $99 per seat per month, and custom Enterprise pricing.