Magic bills $540 a week. That is 13 charges a year, not 12.

At a glance

Both companies sell a dedicated person on a recurring fee, with no placement fee and nothing to pay before they start. Magic's figures below were read on their pricing page at getmagic.com on 17 September 2026. Where that page publishes nothing, the cell says so rather than filling the gap.

Where Magic is the better choice

Magic charges nothing before your assistant starts. Their pricing page, read on 17 September 2026, says you pay when you start working with the person, and there is no contract: you cancel when you want to. We match them on the first part and ask for 30 days' written notice on the second, so on exit terms alone they are looser than we are.

Weekly billing is real flexibility rather than a presentation choice. A month is a long time to be wrong about a hire. Paying in weeks caps the cost of a bad decision at one week of spend, and for a founder who has been through a hire that went sideways, that is worth something concrete.

Two more they win outright:

• 24/7 coverage is included on full-time and Teams plans. Almost nobody in managed staffing offers that. If your business runs overnight, or you need somebody reachable on a Saturday, one person working your business hours (which is what we sell) simply does not cover it.
• Magic Teams is ready to work in 5 days, starting at three assistants and custom-priced. If what you need is a small pod standing up quickly rather than one seat filled carefully, that is a faster route than a search.

And the headline reads cheap, because $540 a week sounds like a fraction of an employee. For general assistant work where a bad week costs you very little, that may be exactly the right purchase.

The core difference

Worked out across a full year, the two prices land close enough that price stops being the decision. What separates us is how much of the arrangement each company puts in writing on a public page, before you have spoken to anyone.

What each of us publishes

• Where the person works from. We publish it: the Philippines for assistants, Latin America and Eastern Europe for sales and operations, Kosovo for finance and accounting, South Africa for sales, matched to the role and working your hours. Magic's pricing page does not state a talent geography, and we are not going to invent one on their behalf. Ask them, because the answer decides your hours overlap.
• What happens if it does not work out. Ours is free replacement as many times as it takes, with four conditions published. Magic's pricing page carries no replacement or guarantee terms at all.
• Who you meet before you commit. Three named people with availability confirmed that week, within 48 hours of your brief, and you choose. Magic shows no talent profiles publicly, so the first person you meet is the one allocated to you.
• How deep the bench goes. Ours runs past assistant work into finance and accounting: bookkeeping, AP/AR, month-end close and reporting, from $2,800 a month. Operations and admin and SDR/BDR/CSR start from $2,500. Magic's individual plans are assistant work.

Underneath that there is a difference in how the person gets to you. We headhunt for the seat: candidates approached for your role, screened against your scope, availability re-confirmed in the week you are hiring. Then our AI layer trains them on the tooling before day one, including Claude Code, captures how the seat is actually done into a living playbook, and coaches the person against it weekly. It is knowledge capture and coaching, not monitoring, and it earns its keep the day somebody leaves, because the next person starts from the playbook instead of from your memory.

What you get for the money

Take their number first, exactly as published. Full-time is $540 a week for 40 hours a week, billed every four weeks. Four weeks at $540 is $2,160. That figure looks like a monthly bill, so it gets multiplied by 12 and written into the budget as $25,920 a year.

A year holds 52 weeks, and 52 divided by 4 is 13. The charge arrives 13 times, not 12. $540 multiplied by 52 is $28,080. The gap between the budgeted number and the paid number is $2,160, which is one entire cycle. Magic states the four-week cycle on the page, so nothing is being concealed here. It is still the single most common arithmetic slip a buyer makes when setting a weekly price against monthly competitors.

Now set ours beside it. An executive or virtual assistant with us starts from $2,400 a month, which is from $28,800 a year. Against $28,080, that is roughly $720 across twelve months, about $60 a month. On the year, full-time Magic and a full-time seat from us are close to the same spend. Be careful with the word "from" on our side: it is a starting rate, and a more senior seat or a finance seat costs more, which is why every number on our pricing section carries it.

That is the part worth sitting with. The comparison most people run is $540 a week against $2,400 a month and it produces the wrong answer, because one of those numbers is annualised at 52 weeks and the other at 12 months. Once both are on the year, you are choosing between two similar bills, and the sensible question becomes what each one includes.

If you want the third number in the comparison, the one that is usually the real alternative, run our cost calculator. It works from the fully loaded cost of a US employee rather than the base salary, which is the step most people skip when they price an in-house hire against either of us.

Speed, and who you actually meet

Magic publishes one speed figure: a Teams setup ready to work in 5 days, on plans that start at three assistants. For the individual plans, the time from signing up to a person starting is not published on their pricing page when we checked (17 September 2026). It may well be quick. You just cannot plan around a number that is not there.

We publish ours and we define the term, because in this category everybody measures a different thing and calls it the same word. Time-to-fill means brief to first day of work. Three availability-confirmed candidates within 48 hours of the brief. On recent placements, 4 to 7 days from brief to first day. Measuring to the shortlist would make us look faster, and it would also be useless to you.

The bigger gap is who you meet. Magic's site shows no talent profiles before a call, so the assistant arrives already chosen. We send three named people, you interview them, and you pick one. For someone answering your phone at 9am Eastern, or reconciling a bank feed your CPA will read, most buyers want a say in that.

Availability is the detail that quietly goes stale everywhere in staffing. A candidate who was free when a recruiter last called them in July is not a candidate in September. We re-confirm availability every week, and the featured people on our front page are public and dated. You can look at people who are actually free this week without booking a call with anyone.

How your risk is covered

Magic's pricing page publishes no replacement or guarantee terms. Not a short window, not a limited one, none at all, when we checked on 17 September 2026. That may simply mean the policy lives somewhere else or is handled case by case on their support side. Either way, it is the one thing you should get in an email before you start, because it is the term that matters on your worst day rather than your first.

Picture that day. A bookkeeper starts on the 3rd, gets ten working days in, and goes quiet on the 28th with the month-end close four days out. What you need then is not goodwill from a support team. It is a rule you can point at.

Ours is free replacement as many times as it takes, and the four conditions are published on our guarantee section: the replacement is for the same role and scope; you gave the person defined work and written feedback; at least 10 working days have passed before a request; and after three replacements either side can walk away on the standard 30 days' written notice. Every guarantee in this market has conditions. Publishing them is the part that gives you something to hold.

Security, plainly

We are not going to make security claims you have no way to check. What we do is specific: an NDA before any access, logins created and owned by you rather than by us, and same-day offboarding when a person leaves the seat. Magic's pricing page does not describe its security posture, so if you handle regulated data, put the question to both of us and compare the answers in writing.

One claim neither of us should make at you is an acceptance rate. Magic describes its talent as the top 0.5%, and figures like that are published across this whole category without a denominator, which makes them impossible to test. We make no such claim, and if we ever do, discount it.

Which one should you pick?

Questions people ask when comparing

Sources and how this page was written

We read Magic's public pages ourselves on 17 September 2026 and quote what they publish, not what a third party says about them. We describe their claims rather than reproduce their copy. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll correct it. Our own numbers come from our pricing section and our published guarantee.

1. 01Magic plans, weekly rates, four-week billing cycle, commitment, coverage and Teams timeline, getmagic.com/pricing, read 17 September 2026
2. 02Contractanaut prices and guarantee conditions, contractanaut.com/#pricing, published and current on 17 September 2026