Ollie
Ollie is a family assistant you reach entirely by text message. It triages school emails, fills your calendar, plans meals and sends reminders, then briefs the whole household — no app, no account required.
What is Ollie?
Ollie is a family assistant published by Confabulation Corporation, based in San Diego, California, and it lives in one place only: your text messages. There is no app to install, no account to create and no card to enter — you text a number and start handing things off. It works over SMS, MMS, RCS and iMessage, and the company positions it squarely against the mental load of running a household.
What separates it from a general chatbot is that it is proactive. ChatGPT or Claude wait for a prompt; Ollie watches the inbox and calendar you connect and speaks first — flagging that uniform sizes are due tonight, that a dentist appointment collides with school pickup, or that the health office emailed about your son. You connect Gmail or Outlook, and Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar, through the standard OAuth consent screen, so Ollie never receives or stores a password and access can be revoked at any time. Meal planning, grocery lists, reminders and local search need no permissions at all.
The site documents eleven families of use with real conversation examples: inbox triage and drafted replies, calendar entries built from a photographed school flyer, morning briefings, reminders, family coordination, meals and groceries, lists, health and macro logging, support, new parents and accountability. Because it runs inside a group text, a partner, a nanny or the children can be added, and everyone receives the same briefing instead of one person relaying it.
Ollie began as a meal-planning assistant — the Ollie for Meals app still exists separately on iOS and Android — before widening to the whole logistics of family life. Replies are generated by third-party models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google under commercial API terms. The company is backed by Khosla Ventures and AI2, claims more than 90,000 families on its meals product, names eleven subprocessors, and says SOC 2 Type I certification is in progress. Pricing is metered in Ollie replies and starts from a permanently free tier.
What it does
- Read your inbox and text you only what actually matters
- Turn a photographed school flyer into calendar events
- Spot schedule conflicts before they happen and offer to sort them out
- Send a morning briefing with weather, agenda and dinner to every phone in the household
- Set, track and chase reminders and to-do lists
- Plan the week's meals and build a grocery list ready for Instacart, Walmart or Amazon Fresh
- Keep shared lists — groceries, packing, films to watch — in sync across the family
When to use Ollie / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Ollie is the right fit.
When to use Ollie
- Parents who hold the family's entire schedule in their head and want it offloaded
- Two working parents trying to stay in sync without one of them relaying everything
- Single parents with no one to hand things off to at the end of a long day
- Households juggling school emails, activities, permission slips and pickups
- People already using ChatGPT or Claude who want an assistant that acts without being prompted
When not to use Ollie
- Businesses and professionals — the terms restrict Ollie to personal, family or household use
- Anyone under 18, and children, who may not use the service independently
- Organisations needing a GDPR framework: no compliance claim, no Article 27 representative, no DPA
- People who want a web or mobile interface — the assistant lives only in text messages
- Heavy users on a tight budget, since pricing is metered per Ollie reply
How to use Ollie
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Text Ollie at the number you are given — no account, no app, no payment card
- Talk to it like a person: ask a question, hand off a task, or ask it to remember something
- Optionally connect email and calendar through the Google or Microsoft OAuth consent screen
- Add Ollie to a group text so your partner, nanny or children share the same context
- Use meals, grocery lists, reminders and local search straight away — these need no permissions
- Ask Ollie at any time how many messages you have left this month
- Turn on top-ups if you run out before your daily allowance refreshes
- Upgrade, downgrade or cancel by texting Ollie, or by emailing hello@ollie.ai
- Disconnect an account or revoke access whenever you like, from Ollie or from your provider
- Text STOP to end the service, or HELP for assistance
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No app, no account and no payment card needed to start — you simply send a text
- Proactive by design: it flags what matters instead of waiting to be asked
- One subscription covers the whole family group chat
- A permanently free tier rather than only a time-limited trial
- Email and calendar connect by delegated OAuth, so passwords are never seen or stored
- Explicit commitments: no advertising, no data selling, no sponsored recommendations
- Unusual transparency for a consumer tool: eleven subprocessors named and retention given category by category
Cons
- No GDPR framework whatsoever: no compliance claim, no Article 27 representative, no DPA
- No hosting country or region disclosed anywhere on the site
- SOC 2 Type I is only "in progress", despite a prominent security block on the homepage
- Metered pricing makes the real monthly cost hard to predict; overage runs at USD 0.30 or USD 0.25 per message
- A steep gap between tiers — USD 25 for 150 messages, USD 100 for 1,000
- Text messaging is the only channel; there is no web or mobile interface for the assistant itself
- Commercial use is contractually forbidden without written agreement, and individual arbitration is mandatory
Pricing & Plans
A permanently free plan is available, requiring neither an account nor a payment card. The cheapest paid plan, Everyday, is priced at USD 25.00 per month. All plans are billed monthly; no annual billing option is offered.
- 50 Ollie messages per month plus 6 free additional messages every day
- 150 Ollie messages per month
- 10 free daily messages
- covers the whole family group chat
- 1
- 000 Ollie messages per month
- 15 free daily messages
- covers the whole family group chat
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Ollie handles your data.
GDPR overview
The site never mentions the GDPR. A search across every page collected — homepage, terms, privacy policy and eleven others — returns no occurrence of "GDPR", "General Data Protection Regulation", "data processing agreement", "Article 27" or "EU representative", and the site's own 33-URL sitemap confirms that no dedicated page exists. The published framework is entirely American: a CCPA section for California residents, Californian governing law and arbitration seated in San Diego County. Rights of access, correction, deletion and opt-out are offered, but presented as depending on where you live rather than on any European legal basis. No Article 27 representative, no data protection officer, no DPA and no hosting location are disclosed. Privacy requests are nonetheless handled at privacy@ollie.ai. The rating here therefore records silence, not a refusal.
Who owns the data?
Under the Terms of Use you keep ownership of the content you send — messages, photos and everything else you ask Ollie to remember. In exchange, Confabulation Corporation takes a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, process, reproduce and modify that content, strictly in order to provide, maintain and secure the service and to enforce its terms. That licence ends when your content is deleted from Ollie's systems, except where retention is required by law or where copies survive in backups for a limited period. If you share a third party's details — a child's school information, another parent's number — you are the one warranting you had the right to.
Reuse rights
Ollie collects your phone number, the messages you send, photos shared by MMS, the preferences and reminders you ask it to keep, and device and usage data. Connected accounts let it read relevant email subjects, senders and bodies, and calendar titles, dates, locations and attendees. The vendor states it accesses only what your enabled features require, and uses it to answer, remind, summarise and improve reliability. Message content passes to Anthropic, OpenAI and Google under commercial API terms that forbid training on it, while de-identified or aggregated data may serve to evaluate and debug Ollie's own systems. Nothing is sold and nothing is shared for cross-context behavioural advertising. Your own content remains yours to reuse or delete without asking permission, and deletion can be requested at any time.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting country or region is disclosed anywhere on the site. The privacy policy lists "Cloud hosting services" among its categories of providers without naming or locating them, and the 33-URL sitemap confirms there is no trust or security page that would. What the vendor does publish is a named subprocessor list: Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Open AI, Groq, Composio, Linqapp, Raindrop, Instacart, Amazon and Walmart. It commits to updating that list and lets you object to a new subprocessor at privacy@ollie.ai, with deletion of your data as the remedy if the objection cannot be accommodated. Stated safeguards include encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest, need-to-know access controls, logging, monitoring and regular security testing, a documented incident response process, and vendor security reviews. SOC 2 Type I certification is described as in progress. Californian governing law is the only jurisdictional anchor the site actually provides.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Ollie.
- No GDPR framework at all: no compliance claim, no Article 27 representative, no DPA and no disclosed hosting location — verified across every page collected
- The homepage pairs a block of security assurances with a "Certification in progress" badge; SOC 2 Type I is announced as under way, not obtained
- "Never used to train AI models" covers third-party models; the privacy policy still reserves de-identified or aggregated data to improve Ollie's own systems, with no documented opt-out
- Message content is kept for up to 24 months by default, and Ollie reads connected email and calendars containing other people's information — children, teachers, other parents — which you contractually warrant you may share
- Delegating memory this completely has a cost: the household stops holding its own schedule, and an outage, a cancelled plan or a changed number puts that load straight back on one person
- The terms impose individual AAA arbitration in San Diego with a class action waiver — opt-out is possible within 30 days by emailing legal@confabulation.ai — and cap liability at the greater of USD 120 or twelve months of fees
- Subscriptions renew automatically with no refunds for partial periods, and overage on metered pricing is billed per message
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Setup is about as light as it gets. You send a text message to the number you are given — no account, no download, no payment card and no technical skill required. The only slightly technical step is optional: granting access to your email and calendar through the standard Google or Microsoft OAuth consent screen, which takes a couple of taps and can be revoked at any time. Meals, lists, reminders and local search work with no permissions at all. Bringing the rest of the household in simply means adding Ollie to a group text.
Deployment
Apps stores
Integrations
Behind Ollie
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Ollie.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to download an app to use Ollie?
How much does Ollie cost?
What counts as a message?
What access does Ollie need to my email and calendar?
Is my data used to train AI models?
How long is my data kept?
Is Ollie GDPR compliant?
Can I use Ollie for work, and is there an age limit?
Should you pick Ollie?
Ollie is a genuinely documented product rather than a promise: three priced tiers with published overage rates, a privacy policy and terms both dated and substantial, eleven subprocessors named, retention set out category by category, and two mobile apps published under the publisher's own package name.
Its proposition is unusual and worth taking seriously. Putting an assistant inside the text thread a family already uses removes almost every barrier to adoption, and making it proactive rather than reactive is a real difference from the general chatbots it compares itself to. For a household drowning in school email and scheduling, that combination is the whole point.
Two reservations deserve weight. The first is regulatory: the site says nothing at all about the GDPR, names no European representative, offers no data processing agreement and never states where data is hosted. For a European reader handing over the contents of a family inbox and calendar, that silence is the single most important fact here. The second is cost: because you pay per Ollie reply, the real bill depends on how talkative the household is, and the jump from USD 25 to USD 100 is steep.
Two smaller points. SOC 2 Type I is announced as in progress, not obtained, beneath a homepage block of security assurances, and should not be read as achieved. And the terms restrict Ollie to personal, family or household use, so professional adoption is excluded.
For a family comfortable with an American privacy framework and willing to watch the message meter, Ollie is well documented and unusually frictionless. For anyone who needs European data guarantees, the site does not currently publish what would be required to judge.
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