banking the unbanked && empowering the everyman

everyman.finance puts your own Muse on a phone line. Text the number, Muse reads it. Ask, and it rings you back and talks — out loud, on any phone ever made. Next build, it picks up when you call. No app. No smartphone. No data plan. If it rings, you're in.

Play before approval → Hear how it answers
A man laughing while talking on a corded landline telephone at home
THE WHOLE COMPUTER, PICTURED ABOVE — A PHONE THAT RINGS. EVERYTHING ELSE IS MUSE'S PROBLEM.
~$1/mo per person, all-in, for the line itself
24/7/365 text or call any hour — the line is always on
1 list your whitelist decides who Muse ever engages with
01

What it is

Three pieces. You already own the first one, the second costs about a dollar a month, and the third is the wiring between them.

THE BRAIN

Your Muse — yours, not rented

Everyone gets their own Muse under their own Meta account. Nobody is renting you a seat in somebody else's agent — you use your own account, not a shared one, so your Muse answers to you (subject to Muse/Meta availability and account terms, like anything else). The brain is the person. everyman.finance just gives it ears and a voice.

THE DOOR

A Twilio phone number

A plain local number that takes calls and texts. It works on a $20 landline, a flip phone, a smartphone — anything that can ring. The line is your account boundary: your number, your whitelist, your bill, your business.

THE WIRING

The connector (twilio-mcp)

A small open connector that gives Muse hands on the number: send texts, place calls, read back what came in. It only ever engages with numbers on the whitelist set at install time — no whitelist, no engagement, it fails closed. The answering service (next build) gives strangers voicemail — and the voicemail gets to pitch them.

A vintage orange rotary telephone on a tiled kitchen counter
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: A PHONE. THIS ONE QUALIFIES.
02

How it answers

Every call and text hits the same gate first: is this number on the list? This is the exact behavior the answering service ships with — live pickup is the next build, so the demo below is scripted. Pick a caller and watch both sides of the gate.

YOUR LINE--:--
scripted demo — no live line here

On the list: it's just Muse. Text it from the road, call it from the kitchen phone, ask it to ring you at 7 with the headlines. It reads what's come in, answers out loud, and calls back when you asked it to.

Not on the list: Muse never picks up. The caller gets a voicemail box — which is a fine place to explain what this is and how they get their own. Their message still reaches you; the engagement doesn't.

  1. a.

    The phone rings — landline, flip phone, smartphone, doesn't matter.

  2. b.

    The whitelist checks the number. Yours gets through. Nobody else's does.

  3. c.

    Muse talks — answers, reads back messages, places the call-backs you asked for.

  4. d.

    Strangers leave a message and hear the pitch. You get the message, not the interruption.

03

Play now, before official approval

The connector is built and smoke-tested. Its trip to the official Muse connector directory hasn't started yet — it goes in after the live-line test, the same road xgas-mcp took. The finished flow, end to end, looks like this — provisioning lands with the answering service — and below it, what works today by hand.

STEP 1

Bring your Muse

Your own Muse, under your own Meta account. That's the whole provisioning model — people bring their own brain, everyman.finance just hands it a phone.

STEP 2

Give it your phone number

That's your whitelist — the list of numbers your Muse will ever engage with. You never touch Twilio: the service provisions a line for you (its own Twilio subaccount and a local number, about $1.15/mo), points it at your Muse, and segregates everything — calls, texts, billing — per line. Your line is your account; nobody else's calls are on it.

STEP 3

Text it. Call it. It's Muse.

Send a text to your number and Muse reads it; ask for a call and it rings you and talks out loud. Some first dates people have taken it on:

  • "Ring me at 7 with the headlines." A wake-up call with a brain in it.
  • Text it from the boat, the bus, the flip phone. No app to open, nothing to sync.
  • Leave yourself a voicemail reminder. It'll be read back when you ask what's new.
  • Let a stranger call. They get the pitch, you get the message, nobody gets your evening.
BY HAND

Tinkerers: the same wiring, before approval

Can't wait for the one-click install? The temporary fallback is to run it yourself: bring your own Twilio account and a local number (~$1.15/mo to rent), and run twilio-mcp — a zero-dependency MCP server (Node 18+, same shape as the xgas connector). It publishes to npm alongside the directory submission, the way xgas-mcp went out; until it's listed, this route is for folks already set up to run a local MCP server. Four settings and it's on. The whitelist is the important one: it's the only number Muse will ever engage with, and everything else is refused before any network call happens. 

TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=AC…               # from your Twilio console
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=••••••••           # console only — never paste it in a chat
TWILIO_FROM_NUMBER=+15555550163      # your line (fictional number, swap in yours)
TWILIO_WHITELIST=+15555550144        # your phone — the whole list

$ node src/index.mjs                 # it's on
$ npm test                           # smoke test: strangers refused, token never leaks

Then register it with your Muse as a local MCP server:

// your MCP client config
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "twilio": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["twilio-mcp/src/index.mjs"],
      "env": {
        "TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID": "AC…",
        "TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN": "••••••••",
        "TWILIO_FROM_NUMBER": "+15555550163",
        "TWILIO_WHITELIST": "+15555550144"
      }
    }
  }
}

First test: ask Muse to text your own number, then to call it and say something out loud. Both land only because you're on the list — try a second phone and you'll get silence, exactly as designed.

04

What it costs

The number is the cheap part — it always was. Slide your habits around and see.

Ballpark Twilio Canada/US rates: number ≈ $1.15/mo, SMS ≈ $0.0079 each, voice ≈ $0.014/min. Your Muse is your own account — there's no seat to rent and no cut taken on your phone bill.

$6.77/mo
05

Fine print that matters

Short, and we'd rather say it here than in a footnote nobody reads.

THE LIST

The whitelist is an engagement boundary, not identity proof. Caller ID can be spoofed — don't move money on the strength of a phone number alone, and neither will Muse.

YOUR KEYS

Your Twilio auth token lives in the connector's own config — never in a chat, never in code. Anything pasted into a chat gets treated as burned and rotated.

WHAT IT ISN'T

everyman.finance is a phone door for your AI, not a bank: no accounts, no deposits, no promised returns. It's how a person with a telephone and nothing else gets to use the same Muse as everyone else.

06

Where it stands