The Manus Credit Revolt

What people were paying for

Manus is an AI agent. You give it a job, such as a website, a slide deck, or a research pass, and it tries to carry out the steps on its own. You do not pay only a flat monthly fee for that. You also spend credits, prepaid units that drop as the agent works. Stronger settings spend them faster. Unused credits can expire. If the agent loops, tries something you did not ask for, or rebuilds work it already finished, the meter can still run.

That meter is what the subreddit keeps arguing about. Posters treat each credit as money they already handed over. When they say they lost 20,000 credits, they mean a balance they expected to spend on purpose.

How a $2 billion purchase became a customer deadline

Manus grew out of a company called Butterfly Effect. It went viral on a demo of an agent that could do multi-step work. TechCrunch later reported that the staff moved to Singapore in the middle of 2025, and that Meta agreed in December 2025 to buy Manus for about $2 billion.

Manus now treats December 29, 2025 as the day that matters for customers. In its help center, that date is "Acquisition Day," measured from midnight Pacific time. Work some users created on or after that day was later put on a deletion list.

The sale did not stay settled. On June 13, 2026, TechCrunch reported that Meta had started taking the deal apart. The story said Meta had stopped sharing data with Manus and, according to Bloomberg, had cut the tool off from Meta's internal systems. Beijing had ordered the sale undone about two months earlier, on national security grounds. Chinese regulators were already looking at the deal under technology export rules and foreign investment rules.

TechCrunch also wrote that the founders had held early talks, described in May reports, about raising roughly $1 billion to buy the company back, with a possible listing in Hong Kong later. Benchmark, a California investor, had already been paid from the sale, the story said, citing the Wall Street Journal. Asian backers including Tencent, HSG, and ZhenFund had signaled they would go along with unwinding it. Senator John Cornyn had questioned whether American money should go to a firm with Chinese roots. Meta and Manus did not answer TechCrunch that day.

That is the government side. The customer side is simpler. A state objected to who owned the agent. People who had been paying for the agent were told to pack up their files.

The dates Manus published

On August 11, 2026, Manus posted "A Note to Our Users." The company said it would operate on its own again and keep serving what it called millions of users. Then it gave the schedule.

• August 11: Notification day. Affected users are warned in the app and, when Manus has an email, by email. In affected regions, new subscriptions stop. Manus said it would not charge affected users during the backup window.
• Until 7:59 a.m. Singapore time on August 23: Backup window. In the eastern United States that deadline was 7:59 p.m. on August 22. If you created new work after a backup, you had to back up again.
• 8:00 a.m. August 23 through August 24, Singapore time: Deletion. The listed data is removed. Affected users cannot open Manus.
• 8:00 a.m. August 25, Singapore time: The restore page opens. Service comes back. You put your files back yourself.

Manus said affected users should expect about two days without access. Everyone else could keep working. The company said it would offer welcome-back bonuses after a restore. It also said this was not a security incident. After the split, it said, data would be stored in the United States and Singapore.

The same morning, a post on r/AI_Agents turned the note into a warning: back up now. The poster, u/elephantbees, wrote that two different Manus accounts had received different dates and offers.

A help-center page, updated August 21, listed what could disappear: the account, subscription records, task history, files the agent had made (Manus named websites and slide decks), and the connections that let Manus talk to other apps. Skip the backup and those task files are gone. There is no final date to restore them. The backup files are the only way back. Lose the files and the work stays deleted.

One instruction was easy to miss. People who logged in only with Facebook had to add another way in before they could back up. Facebook login would stop working after the change. If you had signed up with Apple or Facebook, and Manus had no email, the warning showed up in the app, not in an inbox.

Three kinds of account, in plain language

Manus sorted affected people into Type A, Type B, and Type C. The labels sound like a tax form. The difference is whether your account survives, and which file you need if it does not.

The rules below are Manus's own, shortened.

Changing the email on an older account could move someone into the group scheduled for a full wipe. That detail is easy to skip and hard to undo.

Teams followed the owner. If the owner was Type C, Manus said the whole team would be deleted. If the owner was safe and a member was not, that member's post-purchase work could still go. The owner had to run the backup. A member could not save the team alone. Manus told affected members to contact the owner before the window shut.

Refunds for leftovers were a separate promise. On accounts Manus fully deleted, remaining add-on credits and similar balances were supposed to go back to the original payment method automatically, within seven days, with no form to file. That promise covers money still sitting in the account. It does not, on its face, cover a user who thinks the agent wasted credits on a loop the week before.

The subreddit was already a complaint desk

The August wipe did not start the anger. It gave the anger a date.

In March, u/Reasonable-Pool2027 posted a formal appeal: drop the credits and sell a normal monthly plan. The post walked through the mechanics people hated. Credits did not roll over. Unused credits died at the end of the month. Skip a month and you fell to a weaker "Manus Lite," with paid credits sitting useless until you subscribed again. Buy a higher pack and, the post said, you had to remember to step back down, or the next bill kept the higher price. The usage screen was hard to read. The cancel button was hard to find. Support, the post said, was something you came to Reddit to beg for. The appeal drew 21 upvotes and 16 comments. That is a small thread. It also shows the billing fight was public months before anyone was told to export their chats.

January was louder. On January 20, u/Electronic-Chest9069 wrote that a paying user from the early days had cancelled because Meta had wrecked the product. The post drew 45 comments, the largest thread in this pile. The claims were concrete. The same work burned credits two or three times faster. Automatic paybacks for overspend stopped. A daily drop of 300 credits stopped. Support was a bot, then a person named Dan, who asked for screenshots of an account the company already controlled. Before the purchase, the same user wrote, overspend was often returned within a few days.

A January 14 thread was smaller and sharper: 2,591 credits gone in 15 seconds. One commenter, u/Open_Rip_690, wrote that about 12,300 credits went into a request to review a 650-word document and improve the wording, and that no document came back. A ticket returned 4,000 credits.

By June, the help desk was the story. On June 22, u/Fit_Stage6901 wrote that a 110,000-credit plan bought on June 17 was marked cancelled five days later, and that 90,900 credits vanished overnight. The usage page, the user said, showed credits added and credits used, plus a gap where those 90,900 credits were neither used nor returned. Eight support agents asked for the same screenshots. The refund that arrived was 19,724 credits. The post treated the rest, 71,176 credits, as still missing. Four days earlier the same account said a human had finally taken a case and closed it before a reply. Another commenter described paying for Manus Pro, watching the plan cancel, and receiving neither the plan nor the money, twice, with automated replies in between. A separate June 13 post said a refund chase had run 38 days and passed through 10 named bots.

Sonar has not audited these balances. They are what the posters said they saw in their own accounts. The shape repeats: a balance moves, a ticket starts over, a refund covers a slice.

After the split, the meter sped up

The restore page opened on August 25. The posts kept coming.

On August 15, u/ThenStage8221 wrote that a $200 plan, with 40,000 credits, had been cut to $20 a month during a vacation. When the new cycle started, more than 35,000 credits the user said were already paid for disappeared. A refund was refused. The user wrote that other people in the subreddit had received refunds before "the whole meta thing," and that this time the answer was that nothing could be done.

A comment on that thread, from u/Aggressive_Basis5286 on September 1, describes the backup failure in the clearest terms. The official process showed the backup as completed. The task data needed for a restore was not in it. The user spent about a week with support, sent screenshots, file details, and screen recordings, and watched two conversations close while the issue was still open. The lost material, the comment said, included startup work and project history.

On August 30, u/mrleho said the case had passed through more than six humans and as many AI agents. Building a full site in task mode had cost about 30,000 credits and produced a working site. Redesigning one page in agent mode then used about 20,000 credits and produced nothing the user could keep. The post includes a support reply from an agent named Katie. The reply says Manus could not refund agent-mode work, that credit refunds applied only to task mode, and that the case would close after a week without an answer. The same post said bonus credits appeared after the data restore, while the regular subscription credits did not, and that the billing date seemed to jump from around the 24th of the month to the 11th.

September turned the complaints into a tally.

On September 4, u/Ok_Juggernaut_3539 asked if anyone else's credits were burning faster after the migration. Work that used to last the month hit the limit in four days. A year of history was gone because an account backup had not included the task log. That is the two-file rule, told by someone who saved the wrong file. In the comments, u/LanguageUnited8887 said a task that cost about 600 credits a month earlier had cost 4,500, with 1,000 sent back. u/Akshay9971 said basic research on a setting called Manus 1.6 Max ran about 1,500 credits. u/WingedPhantom0 wrote that $1,000 had gone to an agent circling for hours, and that support could not help with agent-mode chats. u/Logical_Door_81 said the monthly spend had reached $750.

On September 18, u/Severe-Material5646 asked for other tools. One task had spent the credits and never finished. The partial refund was too small to try again. A $40 renewal the day before had not delivered credits after more than a day of support, and the conversation ended. The user asked Apple for the money. A commenter said that after the Meta split the product had gone "straight in the trash," and that people with simpler jobs might not feel it.

On September 23, u/haybeaumont asked the subreddit to answer with a number: how many credits have you lost, especially since the separation from Meta. The post asked for three things: a refund of credits spent on errors, a fix for loops and actions nobody requested, and at least 15 free days. Seven comments came back. One person wrote "countless" and said the business had moved. Another said loops had been constant since the breakup. u/jjjustinr wrote of hundreds of thousands of credits, some expired because the month ended, some burned because a Max setting stayed on from the last job and doubled the cost. "I WAS going to give them my money no matter what," the comment said. Expired credits, it went on, were "the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of." Another comment put a week of Max use at 20,000 credits or more. u/HW_ice, an account that shows up in these threads with product answers, asked the poster to check direct messages.

On September 29, u/MrKittyCodeRed said a few security fixes on two web apps had burned about 25,000 credits on a version the post called Manus 2.0. The fear, the user wrote, was opening the new features at all. The same post said the projects had already used a little over 700,000 credits. A commenter, u/danielattalla, pushed the other direction: three companies built on Manus, heavy use, an average around $300 a month, and a question about what was driving other people's burn. u/Willing-Quote8758 said three image chats on a lighter 2.0 setting cost nearly 1,500 credits and returned no usable image. u/Advanced_Outside179 said the businesses had already moved, citing service, quality, and price.

These threads do not share a leader. The September 23 tally, the closest thing to an organized ask, drew a handful of replies. What repeats is the complaint itself. From a March appeal about expiring credits, through a summer of closed tickets, through an August export order, through a late-September argument about burn rates, r/ManusOfficial stayed the place where customers compared balances.

What Manus can fairly say in reply

The company did not hide the deletion, and it did not call it a hack. It published a note, a help center, a backup tool, and a restore page. It said it would not bill affected users from August 11 to August 23. It promised automatic refunds for leftover balances on accounts it fully deleted. It said people who were not affected could ignore the whole thing.

During the gap, some modes were free. On August 13 a user noticed credits were not falling and asked if the account was frozen. Replies, including one from u/HW_ice, said Manus 1.6 and 1.6 Lite were not charging standard credits through August 25. One comment called that the best thing Manus had done for the public.

A few customers in the same subreddit still describe a tool they will pay for. The $300-a-month comment matters. "Everyone was robbed" is a bigger claim than these threads can carry. People doing short jobs may have felt a price change. People running long agent sessions describe a different product.

The official note still leaves the expensive failure unpriced. A loop is not a regulatory category. If the agent rebuilds a working site from scratch, or spends thousands of credits "reviewing" a short document, the seven-day refund for unused add-on credits does not answer that ticket. Users who reached a person were sometimes told that agent mode sits outside the refund rule. They were also asked for a shareable link to chats the product, by their account, would not let them share.

The backup instructions have the same gap. Manus said to back up again if new work appeared, and it said an account file and a task file were different objects. Users then reported a "completed" backup with no task data inside, and a year of history missing because they saved the account and not the log. When the only copy of your work is a pair of files on your own laptop, a tool that "supports multiple backups" has not promised that the work is safe.

An uprising measured in posts

Call this an uprising and you should say what kind. Nobody took over the product. Nobody published a membership list. The posts that traveled farthest inside the subreddit still sit in the tens of upvotes, not the tens of thousands. The scale is smaller than the word suggests. The record is still worth reading.

Manus sold delegation. The promise of an agent is that you stop watching every step. The bill still charges for the steps, including steps you did not ask for, and it can throw away credits you did not use in time. When the owner of the company changed, and then had to change back under pressure from Beijing, work customers had handed to the agent became a file they had to export on a deadline. The labels were Type A, Type B, and Type C. A Facebook login might not survive the move. The support they met on the way was often another agent, asking for a screenshot, closing the case, or explaining that the expensive mode was the one that could not be refunded.

So the public record moved to Reddit. That is the revolt. A subreddit named for the company became the books, because the books inside the product did not balance where customers could see them. There is still no Manus dashboard that says, in one number, how many credits paying users believe they lost to loops after the Meta split. There is u/haybeaumont asking strangers to type a figure, and strangers typing "countless," "20,000," "hundreds of thousands," "$1,000," and "I moved my business." Those replies were never turned into a statistic. They are the running tally the customers kept for themselves.

Manus closed its August note by promising more features and the same trust. The subreddit's answer, repeated from January through the end of September, is that trust in this product is a receipt. The agent can do remarkable work on a good day. On a bad day the receipt is what the revolt refused to throw away.